The Girl Who Lived
by Bar Sira
Summary: Can a story be about Harry Potter's long-lost American sister without descending into hopeless Mary-Sue-dom? That is what our test subject, Miss Rowena Clay Osborn, will determine for us.
1. Prologue: The Other Survivor

**Author's note:** I originally posted this story in installments on my main account ("Qoheleth"), but I decided about a month ago that the ending I had in mind was utterly pointless, and deleted the story accordingly. In retrospect, however, it seems to me that the chapters I've already written should exist somewhere on the Internet, and I have therefore decided to post them on this, my backup account. This story should, accordingly, be treated as a historical artifact, and not as something that will ever be updated.

**Disclaimer:** Here we have J. K. Rowling, Scholastic Books, and all other owners of Harry Potter. And here we have me. Can you tell the difference? No? Well, trust me, it's there.

* * *

_On the thirty-first day of October, 1981, the dread wizard Voldemort entered the sanctuary of Lily and James Potter. Without mercy he slew both husband and wife, and then turned his fury on their infant son, Harry; but the grace of a mother's love was upon the boy, and Lord Voldemort's curse rebounded upon himself, leaving him a broken and feeble fraction of a human being._

_The news spread more quickly than the fastest owl could fly, and by that afternoon all the magic-workers of Britain were toasting "Harry Potter – the boy who lived". What none of them knew, however, was that there was another survivor of the scene, one who had escaped Voldemort's wrath through her own invisibility – and that she was destined, one day in the far future, to bring about the downfall of her illustrious sibling…_


	2. Macduff Redivivus

Remus Lupin stood in the smoking wreckage of the house at Godric's Hollow, staring down at the lifeless bodies of his best friend and the closest thing to a sister he had ever had.

"James… Lily…" he whispered. "Why did it have to be you? Weren't there others who could have sacrificed themselves for Voldemort's downfall?"

The bodies on the floor offered no reply.

"It could have been Sturgis," said Lupin. "Or Emmeline. Or Mundungus – Merlin's beard, what purpose does Mundungus serve by being alive? Why did it have to be the two of you?"

Silence.

"Damn it all, you blasted heroes, we need you here!" Lupin shouted at his friends' corpses. "Why did you have to go and die on us? We need you!"

Then, without quite knowing how it had happened, he was kneeling on the ground, heaving enormous, desperate sobs into the hem of Lily's robe. He remained there for a number of minutes, soaking her precious satin with what seemed like pints of salt water, until finally his tears ran out and he stood back up, his mouth dry, his legs shaky, and his head throbbing painfully.

"Okay, Remus, time to get a grip on yourself," he muttered. "You can break down again at the funeral, if there is one; right now, you need to take care of the…" (he swallowed) "…of the bodies."

It was true. Hagrid had taken care of Harry, and all the furnishings of the house could wait till later; what needed to be done right now was to get Lily and James's bodies to some competent undertaker before the ways of nature set in. Yet somehow Remus couldn't bring himself to Levicorpus their bodies; the idea of using James's favourite spell on James's lifeless body was too much just then.

To manufacture an excuse for his delay, he wandered into the kitchen, pulled a cracked glass mug out of the debris of the china cabinet, and murmured, "_Aguamenti_." The glass filled with water (which instantly began to seep out through the crack), and Remus took a sip out of it meditatively.

At least Harry had survived, he reminded himself. From a logical point of view, that ought to have transcended all other considerations. The fact that even one Potter had survived the Killing Curse – and, in doing so, had apparently reduced the most evil wizard on Earth to dust and shadows – was far more than he had had any right to expect. He should have been outside right then, setting off shooting stars with Dedalus Diggle.

But the sense of irreplaceable loss remained. Yes, Sirius's godchild still remained – but what of his, or Peter's? What of those "eight or nine miniature Marauders" that James had promised so gleefully at his wedding? They were gone. Voldemort had wiped them off the face of the Earth before they had even been conceived.

Although actually, now that he thought of it, that might not have been completely true. A passage from James's last letter popped into his mind: _By the way, Moony, I probably shouldn't be getting your hopes up so early, but there is just the faintest chance that you may be a godfather in about seven months or so. Lily denies this, of course – she says that the emotional turmoil we've been going through the last few months is quite sufficient to knock her cycles for a spin without outside help – but then, she doesn't know about the extract of mandrake I slipped into her tea that night at Grimmauld Place. Anyway, keep your fingers crossed!_

Remus chuckled sadly. Good old James, sly and earthy to the end. Lord, he was going to miss him.

Still, even if James had managed to plant one more seed in Lily's womb, it didn't make much difference. Lily's womb was as cold as the rest of her now, and the baby – it couldn't have been much further along than the second month – would have died when she did anyway…

Or would it?

As soon as Remus thought about it, the notion became irresistible. Could an unborn child survive a Killing Curse laid on its mother? After all, _Avada Kedavra_ only killed the person the caster wanted it to kill, or someone else who got in the way; that was basic, Professor Ward had taught them that their first year. And it didn't cause any damage to the body, in terms of wounds or blunt trauma; the embryo wouldn't be in danger until its food supply got cut off, and since _Avada Kedavra_ wasn't especially interested in cutting off endometrial secretion, that oughtn't to happen for at least an hour or two…

Remus darted back into what had once been the living room, pointed his wand at Lily's body, and shouted, "_Hominum revelio!_"

For a moment, nothing happened; then, for just a fraction of a second, an orange shape began to glow against the outline of Lily's stomach. It wasn't very large, and it didn't look especially human – in fact, it looked like nothing so much as a very small minnow – but magic didn't lie. There was a live human being trapped inside Lily Potter's corpse.

With a speed that he had rarely, if ever, achieved in his human form, Remus whirled around and began frantically digging through the rubble of the north wall, where the bookshelf containing Lily's texts on Healing had stood. She had to have had something that talked about this, something that would tell him what to do next.

Yes, here it was. _Fructus Ventris: A Healer's Guide to Pregnancy-Related Spells, Potions, and Auguries_. If any book would talk about how to preserve a dead woman's minus-seven-month-old baby, that would.

Remus opened the book to the table of contents and started skimming through the chapter titles. "Spells to Determine the Baby's Sex": no, that could wait till later. "A Potion to Cure Morning Sickness": no. "Reading a Child's Destiny in His Afterbirth": Remus didn't even want to think about that.

"External Womb Technique." Now, that sounded promising. Appendix B, Page 394. Remus flipped to the appropriate place and read:

_In certain extreme cases, it sometimes happens that the infant cannot reside in its natural mother's womb without doing irreparable harm to both mother and child. (The most common such cases are those of sanguinary opposition – what Muggles know as "Rh incompatibility" – but perhaps the most dramatic case was that of Faunus Linkollew, who grew talons during the sixth month and attempted to scratch through his mother's uterine wall.) In such cases, the Healer is well-advised to use the External Womb Technique, a simple but delicate procedure that involves removing the embryo from the mother's womb and encasing it in a sphere of magical fluid that provides the same nourishment and growth to the embryo as the fluid of the womb itself._

Remus nodded. Yes, that was exactly what he wanted. He just hoped he had all the necessary materials.

Somewhat surprisingly, it never occurred to him to doubt his ability to perform the spell, despite his total lack of training as a Healer and the admitted delicacy of the magic involved. Doubt was not a luxury that he had time for.

He read on. The first requirement, it seemed, was to render the pregnant witch unconscious (not a problem in this case, Remus thought) and make an incision in her abdomen large enough for the infant to emerge from. There was a reference made to a Flesh-Separation Charm that was listed some twelve chapters back, but Remus wasn't in the mood to bother with that.

"_Accio Knife!_" he shouted, pointing his wand at the pile of debris that had once been the kitchen counter.

A large, wicked-looking butcher knife wriggled its way out from underneath the pieces of shattered Formica and leapt to his hand. Remus grabbed for it, but the knife was travelling at an odd trajectory and he misestimated its path; he caught it by the blade, and it sliced a chunk out of his right index finger.

Pain, like doubt, was a feeling that he had temporarily shelved. He paid no attention to the stabbing sensation in his finger, or the blood that began to ooze from the wound; he merely righted the knife in his hand, whispered a brief "Sorry, Lils", and ripped open Lily's robes, exposing her bare flesh up to the navel.

What followed was perhaps the trickiest task Remus ever performed in his life. If it hadn't been for all the times Professor Slughorn had placed him in detention and assigned him to dissect a basketful of Chinese jumping beans (Professor Slughorn had considered the tiny worms found inside such beans to be among the most useful potion ingredients known to the wizarding world), he would almost certainly have let his hand slip at some point, and sliced through the very embryo he was trying to save. As it was, he had to perform _Hominum revelio_ three more times, just to keep its location in focus.

At last, though, the opening was made. Remus glanced down at _Fructus Ventris_, which he had propped open with its foot, to determine the next step.

_As soon as the incision is complete, the Healer must instantly perform a Clotting Charm to prevent the mother's perishing from extreme blood loss…_ Not an issue here. What next?

_Now, through a series of Mini-Summoning Charms, the Healer must attempt to coax the embryo into the open area described by the incision. (This should be done with the greatest care, as the embryo's life will be forfeit if the umbilical cord is severed, or if the embryo is removed any further from the womb than is absolutely necessary for the performance of the spell.)_

Mini-Summoning Charms. Now, there was something Remus could do. The ability to change the location of objects very slightly – just enough to disorient a Slytherin so that he walked into a wall without realising it – was among the most important skills a Marauder could possess.

"_Accitio,_" he whispered, his wand pointed toward the opening. "_Accitio. Accitio. Accitio…_"

He repeated this word about forty times without any perceptible change taking place. Then, on the forty-first repetition, he noticed a slight movement in the welter of blood and gore, and, after five or six more incantations, a shape resembling a small minnow became clearly visible.

Hastily, Remus glanced down at the book again. The next step appeared to be the formation of the External Womb itself, and to consist of a sequence of wand movements and mental attentions so elaborate as to send a lesser wizard screaming into the night. Remus himself felt a brief moment of panic, but he forced himself to remain calm.

With the panache of a first-class spell-caster, he flicked, swished, jabbed, and dangled his wand through all forty-seven prescribed movements, then thrust it into the opening and proclaimed, "_Amniotis Simularum!_"

A pale, glistening bubble of fluid emerged from the tip of his wand. It swelled to about the size of a tennis ball, mingling as it did so with both the gore of the opening and the blood from Remus's wound, and then reached out and enfolded the minnow-like shape within itself.

As it did so, a jolt of energy ran through Remus's wand into his body. For a brief moment, he felt a connection with the tiny life inside the bubble – a connection deeper than that of minds, a simple, overwhelming knowledge that this thing was, in fact, alive. For a brief moment, the astonishing thought possessed his mind: _At this moment, a human life depends utterly on my continued presence._

It lasted only for an instant and then was gone, but, for the rest of his life, Remus thought he understood pregnant women a little better than he had before that night.

He raised his wand, and stared into the red-slicked bubble with wondering awe for three or four minutes. He might have stood there for three or four hours, if the sensation of _Fructus Ventris_ slapping shut on his foot hadn't reminded him of his continuing responsibilities.

He reached down and picked up the book again, holding it awkwardly open with the thumb of his left hand while his fingers supported its binding. There was one instruction left on the page: _The makeshift External Womb thus produced will preserve the embryo for the space of about five hours. If the Healer wishes it to survive longer, he must transfer it as soon as possible to a more permanent and self-sustaining External Womb, such as can be found at any first-class magical hospital._

This jerked Remus fully back to reality. Somehow, he had assumed that his spell would keep Lily and James's child alive indefinitely – but now that he thought about it, it was obvious that a bubble the size of a tennis ball should have a strictly limited utility.

He weighed his options. He certainly couldn't walk to the nearest magical hospital, and he wasn't sure how the baby would react to Side-Along Apparition. Floo powder was probably the safest bet – if it was still possible.

He strode over to the fireplace (which, like the rest of the house, was blasted and crumbled, but there were still the remains of a fire inside the grate) and reached up onto the mantelpiece. Yes, there was a bowl of Floo powder there; it was cracked in half and the powder was mostly spilled out, but he managed to scrape together a handful of it – enough to get where he needed to be, at any rate.

"Saint Mungo's!" he shouted, tossing the powder into the grate. He stepped forward, tucking his wand under his robes so that the soot and crumbling stone shouldn't get mixed with the External Womb fluid, and he and his intended godchild vanished in a roar of wind.


	3. At Saint Mungo's

Like most centres of sorcerous medicine, Saint Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries ran its fireplace on Gubraithian fire – which, since it never ceased to burn and never consumed its source, left neither ash nor soot in its wake. It cost a pretty Knut, naturally, but it meant that the hapless individuals who exploded into St. Mungo's via the Floo Network didn't get their wounds, or the open sores on their skin, or – in Remus Lupin's case – the External Wombs they were carrying, any dirtier than they already were.

Remus, however, paid scant attention to this courtesy, or to the blue-and-white banners featuring a baby smashing the Dark Mark that seemed to be draped over every available surface. He simply leapt from the white-porcelain grating, carefully withdrew his wand from beneath his robes, and scampered over to the floor guide on the side of the Information Desk. Artifact Accidents – Creature-Induced Injuries – Magical Bugs – Potion and Plant Poisoning – Spell Damage… where was the section for unborn wizards looking for a more permanent place of residence than the end of a werewolf's wand?

"Um… excuse me?" he said, as a man who was blowing smoke rings out of his nose walked away unsteadily from the desk.

The dark-haired Welcome Witch turned to him, her face wearing that sullen-yet-helplessly-servile expression that Welcome Witches at Saint Mungo's always seemed to perfect within their first week of employment. "Yes, sir, what is it?" she said.

Then she saw his wand, and her expression abruptly changed. "Is… is that an External Womb, sir?" she breathed.

"Um, yes," said Remus. "You see…"

"Well, I'll be jiggered," said the Welcome Witch. "Can I hold it?"

Without waiting for a reply, she deftly removed Remus's wand from his hand and stared into the little bubble at the tip. "Well, isn't she just the most precious thing!" she exclaimed.

"She?" Remus enquired.

"Oh yes, you can tell it's a girl from the fluid colour," said the Welcome Witch. "The External Womb adapts itself to the embryo inside it, and it's only for girls that it turns that pale pinkish colour. With boys, it's generally closer to a steely gray or blue – the heavier, grosser colours, you know."

Remus suspected that his sex had just been subtly insulted, but he judged it injudicious to protest.

"So, then," he said, "am I right in concluding that magical embryology is a particular expertise of yours?"

The Welcome Witch arched her eyebrows, and smiled enigmatically. "Perhaps I should introduce myself," she said, extending a long-nailed hand. "The name's Evelyn Linkollew."

_Linkollew_. The name rang a vague bell in Remus's head, but he couldn't say just why. Something he had read recently… Then he realised.

"Linkollew?" he said. "Any relation to Faunus Linkollew?"

"His niece," said Evelyn, who, to judge by her broad smile, considered this a mark of signal honour. "Back when I was a little girl in Caernarvon, I used to spend all my spare time popping in and out of his Foundation."

"His Foundation?" Remus queried.

"You know, the Linkollew Foundation," said Evelyn. "For the preservation and welfare of EW babies. Uncle Faunus was passionate about the subject – natural, of course, since it was the reason he was alive, after all – and I guess a little of that wore off on me," she finished with a shy smile.

"H'm," said Remus. "Well, if you have such a passion for the subject, perhaps you can tell me where I take this little EW baby."

"Oh, the tanks are in the basement," said Evelyn, "but first you have to fill out the form. I'll get you one, just a moment – here, you can have her back…"

As she handed Remus back his wand, she seemed for the first time to notice the cut on his finger. "Ooh, that looks nasty," she said. "What happened?"

"Oh, nothing serious," said Remus. "I Summoned a knife to make the incision, and I caught it at the wrong end."

Evelyn stared at him. "You used a _knife_?" she said. "Don't you know that you're always supposed to use a Flesh-Separation Charm for the incision? An unsterilised blade can lead to infection, it can cause internal damage, it can…"

Remus held up a hand. "Thank you for your concern, Miss Linkollew," he said, "but it didn't make much difference in this case."

There was a pause as Evelyn processed that information. Then her eyes widened. "Oh," she said. "You mean the mother was…"

"Yes," said Remus.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Evelyn. "Was she your wife?"

"A friend."

Evelyn sighed. "It's been a wretched decade, hasn't it?"

Remus nodded.

"Still, it's over now," said Evelyn. "Long live Harry Potter!" and she pulled her wand out of her pocket and sent a shower of sparks flying into the air.

Remus laughed. "I'll drink to that," he said.

"Well, I should hope so," said Evelyn. "Now, then, let's see about that form." She turned and bent under her desk, and spent a few moments sorting through what appeared to be a substantial pile of loose forms.

"Yes, here we are," she said, straightening up again and holding up an orange sheet of paper. "Now, then, let's see… the first question it asks is about the baby's name. Of course, at this stage, I don't suppose that the parents had spent much time discussing names, but…"

"Let's say Rowena," said Remus.

Evelyn looked up at him and arched an eyebrow. "Were you in Ravenclaw House, then?" she said.

Remus shook his head. "Gryffindor," he said, and grinned. "I always had a soft spot for Ravenclaws, though. How about you?"

"Oh, I didn't go to Hogwarts," said Evelyn. "I was home-schooled. –Surname?"

Remus almost said "Potter", but caught himself in time. Voldemort may have been killed (or stopped, anyway), but there were still at least a hundred Death Eaters wandering around Britain, most of whom probably were out seeking revenge on their master's defeater. Until they were all rounded up, it was going to be a dark time for anyone named Potter – particularly if she also happened to be an External Womb baby hacked from her mother's recently-dead body on the very night that Lily Potter went to meet her Maker.

_Think, Remus,_ he said to himself. _If she's not Potter, then she must be…_

"Clay," he said, surprising himself with his ingenuity.

"Rowena Clay," said Evelyn, scratching at the form with a quill. "Parents' names?"

"Petunia and John," said Remus after a moment's thought.

Evelyn nodded. "Cause of need for EW, mother's death… and your name, sir?"

"Jim Barnett," said Remus at a venture; it was one of a hundred aliases he had used during the war.

"…'Bar-nett'," Evelyn repeated, scribbling that down. "All right, then, you're all set. Raymond!" she called to a nearby orderly. "Take Mr Barnett down to the EW tanks, would you?"

Raymond – a stocky, brown-haired man, badly in need of a shave – nodded wordlessly, took the form from her hand, and motioned for Remus to follow him. Evelyn, meanwhile, turned back to the line that had formed at her desk during this interval and snapped back into Permanently-Aggrieved Welcome-Witch Mode; as Remus walked away, the last words he heard her say were, "You see this symbol, ma'am? Next to the phrase 'Spell Damage'? That is the Arabic numeral for 'four'. Now, which floor do you suppose that means?"

* * *

"So that's how to impress Evelyn Linkollew, is it?" said Raymond. "Show up with an External Womb on the end of your wand?"

"Hmm?" said Remus, whose thoughts had been elsewhere. (Specifically, they had been dealing with the question of how an institution with such a clean fireplace could have such a dirty basement.) "I'm sorry, did you say something?"

"Oh, it's just that I've been trying to get Evie to notice me for the last three years, and I've gotten nowhere," said Raymond. "You pop in here carrying a glowing bubble, and instantly she goes all oozy-goozy over you."

"Oh," said Remus. "Well, I'm sorry. I had no intention…"

"Oh, don't apologise," said Raymond. "'S not your fault. It's just ironic, that's all."

"Ah," said Remus.

"Well, I mean to say," said Raymond, "you wouldn't think a girl with a Beast-Man for an uncle would have much room to be choosy, now would you?"

"Maybe she's worried that her bloodline's tainted," Remus suggested, "so she's trying to avoid marriage entirely." This was a concern he was intimately acquainted with.

"Did I say anything about marriage?" Raymond demanded. "I'm just talking about a cup of tea now and then. Even if she's a werewolf, she ought to be able to manage that."

His choice of hypotheticals caught Remus off guard, and before he could think of an appropriate reply, Raymond added, "Well, here we are," and flipped a light switch.

Since the light-bulb in the ceiling lamp had not been changed in several months, the increase in visibility that this action produced was not overwhelming, but it was enough for Remus to see that the shadowy, box-like shapes against the far wall, which he had taken for crates of medical supplies, were actually glass cases full of pale, gleaming fluid – clear, for the most part, although every so often one of the cases would contain a small, fish-like shape, and then the fluid might be any color from light orange to a deep royal purple.

"There's your External Wombs for you," said Raymond. "We don't use them much – 's not a common procedure, y'know – so they might be a little dusty, but we'll soon put that right."

He walked over to the wall and drew out a case from the middle of the display. (Remus was mildly surprised to find that all the cases above it remained in their positions; apparently the Wombs were placed in niches in the wall, rather than stacked against it, as he had first thought.) He spat on the top of the case and rubbed it with the edge of his robe for a few minutes; then, satisfied, he brought it over to Remus.

"There you are, then, Mr Barnett," he said, opening a small, oval-shaped window in the top of the case. "Just slip her in there, and it'll do the rest."

Hesitantly, Remus poked the end of his wand into the clear, luminous fluid in the case. As he did so, he felt the weight of his makeshift Womb detach itself from his wand, and the embryonic Rowena drifted down into the case; the drops of blood dispersed and flowed off toward the glass walls, and the fluid began to glow more brightly and to assume the pale-pink colour that Evelyn had noticed in the bubble.

"And that's all there is to it, sir," said Raymond, flipping the oval window shut again and writing ROWENA CLAY on the side of the tank with his wand. "For the next seven months, Miss Clay's welfare is the concern of Saint Mungo's Hospital."

"And then what?" said Remus.

"Well, that depends," said Raymond. "Is her father alive?"

"No," said Remus. "He died… he died shortly before her mother did." (So far as he could tell, it was true – James's body had been closer to the door, which suggested that Voldemort had killed him first – and, for Rowena's sake, Remus didn't want to tell any more of the real story than he had to.)

"In that case, we'll probably put her up for adoption," said Raymond. "Unless you wanted to take her in, that is."

"Oh, no." Remus laughed, and shook his head. "No, I don't think my… lifestyle… would make it advisable for me to take in a child."

"Well, then, you're free as a bird, Mr Barnett," said Raymond. "Better say a proper good-bye to the young lady, 'cause it's unlikely you'll be meeting her again."

Remus nodded, and lowered himself onto his haunches, so that his eyes were level with the glass. As he watched the vestigial witch drift around inside the tank, oblivious to the war that had destroyed her family, the wizard who had saved her life, or anything besides the warmth and goodness of her surroundings, he felt a lump begin to rise in his throat.

"Good-bye, Rowena," he whispered hoarsely. "Live well… grow strong… make your parents proud…" Then his voice failed him completely, and he swallowed, rose, and turned back towards the stairwell.

"We'll send you an owl if anything unexpected happens, of course," came Raymond's voice from behind him. "But most likely nothing will. There's not usually a lot of surprises with EW babies."

Remus laughed quietly. _That's all you know about it, my dear Raymond, _he thought. _That girl's parents are James and Lily Potter. You bet your wand there are going to be surprises with her._


	4. Interrupted Growth

And about a month later, on the 11th of November, he learned how right he had been.

It was the morning after the full moon, and that month's transformation had been a particularly grueling one for Remus. When he returned to his apartment, ragged, bleeding, bleary-eyed, and exhausted, he wanted nothing more than to flop down on his bed and sleep for perhaps a week – and, accordingly, his feelings on discovering an owl tapping irritably at the kitchen window, holding a small, white envelope in its talons, were little short of murderous.

He yanked the window open, snatched the letter from the owl's foot (the bird, startled, was nearly knocked off the window-sill, and flew away hooting in a deeply offended tone), tore it open, and pulled out the letter.

_Dear Mr Barnett,_ it read, in a flowing, feminine hand, _something terrible's happened with Rowena. I can't go into details here, but we might not be able to keep her at St Mungo's. Please come over as soon as possible. Yours ever, Evelyn Linkollew._

Between the obscurity of this passage and the current less-than-acute state of his mind, it took Remus three or four re-readings before he realised what his correspondent was talking about. Rowena… St Mungo's… Linkollew… External Wombs… James and Lily's daughter… good God.

Hastily, he turned on the kitchen sink and splashed a few handfuls of cold water on his face. His mind thus stabilised, he turned and went downstairs to the lobby of his apartment building.

"Morning, Mr Lupin," said the landlady, a portly woman named Collins, gazing at him with cool disapproval. "Enjoy your monthly spree, did you?"

"Loved it," said Remus coolly. He wasn't precisely proud that his landlady thought him a notorious drunkard, but it was better than her knowing the truth.

"Mark my words, Mr L.," said Mrs Collins. "One of these days, you're going to wake up and wonder what you're doing with your life."

"No doubt," said Remus. "Would you mind if I used the fireplace?"

"Go right ahead," said Mrs Collins. "You're a paying tenant; the Lord alone knows how, the way you drink up Galleons, but you manage somehow. Can't cut you off the Floo Network just for being a degenerate hedonist."

"Glad to hear it," said Remus, and went over to the broad brick fireplace at the far end of the lobby and took a handful of powder.

"Did you read that pamphlet I put on your doormat?" called Mrs Collins after him.

"Saint Mungo's!" Remus shouted, tossing the powder in the air and vanishing in a puff of flame.

"Didn't think so."

* * *

St Mungo's, apart from having less crepe paper draped over it, was much the same as it been during his last visit – the same squeaky-clean fireplace, the same spacious waiting room, the same crowd of paranormally-mutated patients milling about – with one significant exception: the Welcome Witch was not the same. The young woman behind the Help Desk on this occasion was a stout redhead who, to judge by the looks she was shooting at the living icon of cuckoldry at the front of the queue, was at least three-quarters goblin.

Remus, observing this, naturally concluded that Evelyn hadn't arrived at work yet – possibly her hours were later in the afternoon – and, accordingly, plopped himself down in a nearby chair, reached for the dullest periodical he could find (_Gringotts Galleon-Watch: Wizarding Britain's #1 Source for Financial News_), and settled down for a few much-needed minutes of slumber.

No sooner had he closed his eyes, however, than he heard a high-pitched voice with a pronounced Welsh accent calling, "Mr Barnett?"

He opened his eyes again, glanced around the waiting room – slowly, so as not to set his head throbbing worse than it already was – and realised that Evelyn, accompanied by Raymond the orderly, was standing across the room from him, next to the basement door, and was motioning for him to join her. Slowly, and with an irrational sense of being greatly imposed upon, he rose from his seat and moseyed over to her.

"Lordy, Mr Barnett, you look terrible," was Evelyn's opening comment. "What on Earth have you been doing to yourself?"

Remus shrugged. "I was out on a bit of a tear last night," he said, neglecting to add that what he had torn was mostly his own skin. "I was rather hoping I would get a chance to recuperate slightly before going out to face the world again, but evidently it wasn't to be. So if I start fainting, babbling deliriously, or throwing rocks at imaginary rats, just remember that I warned you."

Evelyn nodded dispassionately. "I've had mornings like that," she said. "Well, let's get to business. You remember Mr Raymond, I suppose?"

"Certainly," said Remus, quelling his momentary surprise at finding that Raymond was the orderly's surname, rather than his Christian name, as he had supposed. "And how are you this morning, Mr Raymond?"

"I've been better," said the orderly, taking Remus's outstretched hand. "In fact, I was better not four hours ago, before Miss Linkollew here battered down my door and told me to get down to the Hospital poste haste, because the world was coming to an end for reasons unspecified."

"Just ignore him, Mr Barnett," said Evelyn. "He's a Tory; he's been in a bad mood since Fudge was elected. Now, if you two gentlemen will kindly accompany me downstairs, I will explain our little problem."

_Our little problem__._ The phrase set up an association in Remus's mind – a completely random and meaningless association, of course, but nonetheless one that he found very hard to shake off. As the three of them tramped down the steel stairs to the External Womb tanks, Remus could scarcely help whispering to himself, _"our furry little problem."_

"Here," said Evelyn, stopping before one of the tanks, "we have the lovely Rowena Clay. You notice a difference, perhaps?"

Remus certainly did. The young witch who, less than a month before, had been scarcely distinguishable from a low-phylum fish had now grown distinguishable arms and legs, and one could even point to the spots where her eyes would be. She still had a way to go before she would be stealing young wizards' hearts, but the progress was unmistakable.

"This must have been her second month," said Evelyn. "That's when the embryo does most of its growing." Then, without warning, her lower lip began to tremble, and she swallowed heavily.

"Something wrong?" said Remus.

Evelyn shook her head. "No, not really," she said. "It's just… I wish Uncle Faunus could be here for this."

Remus was touched, and placed a hand on her shoulder. "Don't worry," he said. "I'm sure he's watching and smiling down on you even as we speak."

Evelyn glanced up at him, frowning. "How?" she said. "He's in Burma."

"Oh," said Remus, blinking and removing his hand. "I'm sorry, I thought you meant… something else."

Raymond smirked. "Rather a morbid fellow, ain't he, Evie?" he remarked.

"Most people are, when they're standing in front of the tank containing the minus-seven-month-old baby daughter of their late best friends," said Evelyn coolly. "Even you would be, I expect, Tom."

Raymond shrugged. "'S hard to be sentimental about death when you're practically dead on your feet yourself," he said. "What's all this about, anyway? You drag us out of bed just to tell us that little Ronie's developed arms and legs?"

"Oh, that," said Evelyn. "Just a moment, I have it here somewhere…" She pulled out a bag and started rummaging through it, and Remus and Raymond settled themselves into that minutely-less-attentive position that males assume when females begin rummaging through bags.

After a few minutes, Remus turned to his companion and said, "'Ronie'?"

Raymond gave him an annoyed look. "Yes, Ronie," he said. "'S what we used to call Rowena Brunner, back at Hogwarts."

"Brunner?" Remus frowned. "I don't remember a Rowena Brunner."

"Hufflepuff?" said Raymond. "Class of '78?"

Remus cast his mind back. "Well, that was my year, but… what did she look like?"

"Found it," said Evelyn, pulling a photograph out of her bag. "If you gentlemen will just examine this…"

"Dark hair, middling height, freckles," said Raymond. "Bit of a caution, she was: always correcting Binns when he slipped up on dates…"

"Oh, _her_!" said Remus. "Her name was Brunner? I thought Binns always called her Miss Brinkley."

"Boys?" said Evelyn, holding up the photograph.

"In all the time you were at Hogwarts," said Raymond, "did Binns ever get a name right?"

"True," Remus acknowledged. "So… you knew Rowena/Ronie Brunner/Brinkley?"

"Somewhat/slightly," said Raymond with a grin. "I remember one trip we made to Hogsmeade together, when she…"

BANG!

Remus and Raymond started in unison and turned to Evelyn, who was holding the photograph in one hand and her wand, still smoking, in the other.

"Gentlemen," she said, in the peculiarly deprecating tone home-schoolers use when humouring the follies of the traditionally educated, "as engaging as your memories of old school flings no doubt are, I really think you might want to look at this before you immerse yourselves any deeper in the past."

Remus glanced at Raymond, who shrugged as if advising resignation to the vagaries of women. With a sigh, the supposed Jim Barnett stepped forward and took the photograph from Evelyn's hand, and then frowned for a long moment at what looked like a small minnow in a glowing tank.

"What's this?" he said.

"That, Mr Barnett," said Evelyn, "is a photograph of Rowena, as she was when I came down to check on her last night."

Remus blinked. "Last night?" he repeated.

"Last night," said Evelyn.

"But that can't be right," said Remus. "This is the way she looked when I brought her in nearly a month ago. She can't have gone a month without growing at all, and then become a full-fledged humanoid in just a few hours."

Evelyn shook her head. "Mr Barnett, you don't understand," she said. "Yesterday afternoon, Rowena looked basically like she does right now. It was only after night fell that she went back to being an undifferentiated mass of cells."

Remus frowned. "And now she's differentiated again," he said.

"Exactly," said Evelyn. "Something happened last night that caused her to slip back almost to the beginning of her development, but it only lasted as long as the night did – and there's only one thing I can imagine that that means."

A strange, impossible idea was gradually forming in Remus's mind. "And what would that be?" he said slowly.

Evelyn gazed up at him with intense, unblinking eyes. "Mr Barnett," she said, "were Rowena's parents werewolves?"


	5. What Makes a Monster?

"Werewolves?" Remus repeated, with a desperate attempt at a smile. "What do you mean, werewolves?"

"Think about it," said Evelyn. "A wolf's gestation period, I would assume, is about the same as a dog's, which is only about two months. That means that a human embryo in the second month is at the same point, relative to gestation, that a wolf embryo reaches after only two weeks or so. So if the embryo in question is a werewolf, and turns into a wolf embryo when the full moon is up – as it was last night…"

"…then she becomes a two-week-old embryo again," said Raymond, catching on. "And that's why she wasn't differentiated last night."

"Exactly."

"But… but how can an embryo be a werewolf?" Remus demanded. "You don't think Fenrir Greyback broke into her tank and bit her on the vestigial leg, do you?"

"From what I've heard of Fenrir Greyback, he might very well have tried," said Evelyn with a grim smile, "but I'd like to think that Saint Mungo's security is better than that – and anyway, there would have been signs of a struggle. That's why I asked about Rowena's parents."

"How do her parents come into it?"

"Think, Mr Barnett," said Evelyn, with a tired little sigh (Remus suddenly realised that she probably hadn't gotten any sleep the previous night, either). "You're the one who went to Hogwarts; what did your seven Defense against the Dark Arts teachers have to say about lycanthropy? How is it transmitted?"

Remus hesitated, casting his mind back to Professor Silver's O.W.L. class. "By means of the intermingling of the lycanthrope's vital fluids with those of the victim," he recited slowly. "This is usually achieved when the lycanthrope bites a human and mixes his saliva with the human's blood, but it can theoretically be accomplished by other means."

Evelyn nodded. "That's what I thought," she said. "I remember when Uncle Faunus used to hold blood drives for the sanguinary-opposition babies, one of the caveats he had was that he didn't want any blood from werewolves."

"How prejudiced of him," said Raymond dryly. "They should pass a law preventing that kind of discrimination."

"So," said Evelyn, ignoring her co-worker, "if you're bitten by a werewolf, you become a werewolf. If you get a blood transfusion from a werewolf, you become a werewolf. Doesn't it make sense that, if you're conceived by a werewolf, you become a werewolf? I'll ask again, Mr Barnett: were Rowena's parents werewolves?"

Remus, at this point, was scarcely sure himself. He knew better than anyone that Lily and James Potter had not shared his malady, but Evelyn's diagnosis had hit close enough to home to completely unseat his reason. He was almost convinced that he had slept with Lily himself that night at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

"Suppose I said 'yes'," he managed after a moment. "What would happen then?"

Evelyn looked acutely uncomfortable at this question. "Well, you understand, of course, Mr Barnett, that Rowena is only here because the management of Saint Mungo's – and particularly the superintendent, the delightful Mr Pontius Buck – don't object to her being here. If we told them that she was a werewolf…"

"Why should you have to tell them?" said Remus.

Evelyn looked shocked that he had to ask the question. "Mr Barnett, Mr Raymond and I have a responsibility to see that every patient at Saint Mungo's gets the care he or she requires. If Rowena's a werewolf, that vastly complicates the issue of her EW care, her feeding – I'm surprised she even survived a night as a wolf embryo in an External Womb designed for humans. The situation is far too big for the three of us to handle alone; we have to present it to the proper authorities."

Remus sighed. "I see. And may I presume that the proper authorities, upon learning that Rowena was a werewolf, would insist on having her be born far from the usual ward, making sure she never saw other children, and in general treating her the way I am told medieval Muggles treated lepers?"

"No, Mr Barnett," said Evelyn. "They wouldn't waste that much effort."

Something in her tone caused Remus to glance up sharply. "What do you mean?" he said.

"Mr Buck doesn't quite think about embryos the way you and I do," said Evelyn. "To him, they're not so much actual witches and wizards as things that might someday become witches or wizards, so whether you should keep them alive depends on whether you want that particular witch or wizard to come into existence. If he realised that this particular embryo would grow up to be a werewolf, he wouldn't hesitate a moment before ordering us to kill her."

"What?"

"What else would he do?" said Evelyn. "Wait until she becomes a real human being, put her in an orphanage, and have said orphanage sue the hospital when she starts biting the nurses? A parentless baby werewolf is an inconvenient thing, Mr Barnett. So much nicer if it never exists in the first place."

"You can't let that happen," said Remus.

"I know that," said Evelyn plaintively, "but what else can I do? If I took her to another hospital, they'd feel the same way – and like I said, she's going to need some kind of expert treatment if she's going to be changing species once a month…"

"What about your uncle?" said Raymond.

Evelyn blinked, and turned to stare at the orderly. "My uncle?"

"Yeah, your Uncle Faunus," said Raymond impatiently. "The great expert on EW babies, the one you've been talking about nonstop for the past three weeks. He wouldn't kill a poor little orphan embryo just because she happened to be a monster, would he?"

"Um… no," said Evelyn. "No, I don't suppose he would."

"All right, then," said Raymond. "Send an owl out to Rangoon or wherever he is, and tell him that he needs to Apparate back to London toute suite because a human life hangs in the balance. If he's anything like what you've been saying, he won't be able to resist the opportunity to do a bit of good."

Evelyn swallowed heavily. "Do you know, Tom," she said, "I think that's the first time I've heard anyone outside my immediate family have a kind word to say for Uncle Faunus."

Raymond coloured slightly, and his manner became brusque. "Well, hang it all," he said, "a good man's a good man, however many scales he's got."

At those words, a queer expression began to come over Evelyn's face, an expression that made Remus think irresistibly of his feelings when James, Sirius, and Peter had first turned into animals in front of him. For a moment, he had an inkling of what it must be like to be born into a tainted family, a family that had rejected the world before the world could reject them; to live your life at a distance from others, always anticipating the scorn of the undefiled and the revulsion of the pure; and then to find, to your own astonishment and delight, that there is goodness and charity in the world after all.

In other circumstances, he might have felt a glow of happiness for the young witch, but, as it was, his mind was too full of other concerns for him to reflect long on the matter. James and Lily's daughter was a werewolf: why? And what was to happen to her now? He needed to discuss the matter with someone, and there was only one person he felt sure would have both understanding and knowledge.

"Well, then," he said to Evelyn, "you'll have your uncle pick Rowena up and take her to his Foundation?"

Evelyn nodded vaguely, her eyes still fixed on the intensely uncomfortable Raymond.

"Good," said Remus. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to be meeting with someone…"

Neither Evelyn nor Raymond responded, and Remus interpreted this as leave to go. He hurried back up the stairs, slammed the cellar door behind him, and darted his eyes about the Saint Mungo's waiting room.

_Where is she, now?_ he thought. _I know she's around here somewhere… ah, there she is, straight across from me._

"Dilys!" he hissed, waving at the portrait of Dilys Derwent on the far wall. The 18th-century Headmistress seemed startled, but, at Remus's gesticulations, compliantly scurried out of her frame and into a still life near to where he was standing.

"Well, now, Mr Lupin," she said, "and what's this all about? Really, if I had known that people were still going to be rushing me about 200 years after my death, I might not have sat for this portrait…"

"Dilys," Remus interrupted her, "can you tell Dumbledore that I want to speak with him?"

Derwent blinked. "Yes, I suppose I could," she said. "Is there a reason I should give him, or do you just want to spend time in his presence?"

"Tell him…" Remus thought for a moment. "Tell him that the objection to my entering Hogwarts is now an objection to the youngest Potter staying at Saint Mungo's."

Derwent gave him a quizzical look, but nodded and walked out of the picture frame. She was gone for about a minute and a half, and when she returned, she was wearing an amused smile.

"My successor says," she reported, "that that is the most intriguing message he has received since the late Professor Gosselin warned him against eating plum pudding with chopsticks in 1973. He awaits your arrival in his office with bated breath."

"Good," said Remus. "Tell him I'll be there shortly."

Derwent curtsied and left her frame again, and Remus walked over to the fireplace, took a pinch of Floo powder, and, with a brief whisper of "Headmaster's office, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry", sailed off to determine the fate of his would-have-been goddaughter.


	6. Mother of Exiles

"Rowena?" said Professor Dumbledore thoughtfully, pronouncing the name as though he were tasting some new Muggle candy.

"It seemed sufficiently anonymous," said Remus. "Ex-Ravenclaws are always naming their daughters Rowena, aren't they?"

"Yes, of course," said Dumbledore. "It is a good name. The maiden of the rowan tree: quite appropriate for a young witch."

One of his predecessors, however, appeared to have other ideas. "_Cha robh dùil agam,_" came a sibilant, disapproving voice from somewhere among the wall of former Heads, "_gun toireadh cuideigin an t-ainm aig mo Roineadh do peasan neo-breith agus leth-ainmhidheal idir._"

"_Sìdh agaibhse, a Shalasair,_" Dumbledore replied sternly.

Remus glanced up at the section of the wall from whence the voice had come. "What was that about?" he said.

Dumbledore sighed. "All of Hogwarts's former Headmasters and Headmistresses have their portraits on this wall, Remus," he said, "even those that later renounced this school and returned to their native Bogwain to breed Dark wizards. What you just heard was the voice of Salazar Slytherin, saying that he never expected to see Rowena Ravenclaw's name given to – forgive me, but I must use his own words – an unborn, half-bestial bratling."

Ordinarily, Remus would have responded to this statement with either some tart comment on the famous Parselmouth's prejudices or an expression of surprise that the Headmasterial portrait gallery extended all the way back to the Four Founders. The fact that he did neither demonstrated just how thoroughly he was consumed with Rowena's fate.

"How is this possible, Professor?" he demanded. "How could James and Lily's daughter have acquired the curse of Lycaon without even being born?"

Dumbledore nodded. "Yes, that is most unusual," he said. "I would have almost said that it was inexplicable, if another wizard under the same curse had not figured so prominently in her early life."

Remus's face darkened. "Professor," he said, "if you're suggesting that she isn't James's daughter…"

"Oh, no, no," said Dumbledore, waving the implication aside as if it were too absurd to be worth discussing. "I don't in the least believe that you did anything improper with Lily Potter – but I do believe that removing an embryo from a dead woman's body is an extremely tricky affair, fraught with possible ways to go wrong."

"Meaning what?"

"May I see your right hand?" said Dumbledore gently.

Remus frowned, and extended the extremity named. Dumbledore took it and turned it palm upwards, tapped Remus's thumb with his wand, and whispered, "_Vulnus revocatio_."

As he did so, the skin of Remus's thumb momentarily glowed orange – pale orange, for the most part, barely distinguishable from flesh, but there was a long, broad spot along the middle that was so dark as almost to be black. Remus recognised it easily; it was the outline of the wound that he had received from the Summoned knife, which had fully healed only a few days before.

Dumbledore nodded sadly. "I thought as much," he said. "You received this while you were extracting Miss Clay, I suppose?"

"Yes, of course," said Remus. "What does that…" Then he realised, and his voice trailed off.

"And then, presumably," said Dumbledore, "a few drops of your blood slid down the length of your wand, and mixed with the External Womb dangling at its end." He sighed. "As the Muggles say, no good deed goes unpunished."

"Wait a moment," said Remus. "You're saying… you're saying that if any other wizard had saved Rowena's life, she would be perfectly healthy today – that it's only because I happened along that she ended up a werewolf?"

"A wifewolf, actually," said Dumbledore. "'Were' is masculine. But in essence, yes, that's correct."

With a moan, Remus folded his arms on the Headmaster's desk and sunk his head into them with a thump. For some moments he lay motionless, while Albus Dumbledore and his hundred and three predecessors stared down at him with varying degrees of sympathy; then, with a stiffness born of more than just lack of sleep and the trials of lycanthropy, he lifted his head and stared into Dumbledore's eyes.

"All right, then," he said. "Now we know what happened. The next question becomes, what do we do now?"

Dumbledore leaned back in his chair thoughtfully. "Well," he said, "for the next six months, we don't have to do anything. The estimable Linkollew Foundation will be doing all the important work concerning Miss Clay – although it would, perhaps, be a good idea to locate the facility where they will be keeping her and install a few Order members in the neighborhood. Once she reaches viability, however, the matter becomes much more serious."

"To be sure," Remus murmured. "We can't let just anyone to adopt her; it'll have to be one of the Order members. Sturgis, perhaps; he's always wanted a daughter…"

Dumbledore shook his head. "No, Remus, you don't understand," he said. "Rowena cannot stay in this country."

Remus blinked, and dug a finger into his ear. "I'm sorry, Professor," he said. "I didn't get a lot of sleep last night, so my ears might occasionally fail me. It sounded as though you said that Rowena couldn't stay in England."

"She can't," said Dumbledore. "Nor can she stay in Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland – and perhaps five years ago she might have been safe in the colonies, but after the Muggle-killings in Hong Kong, I am inclined to think that danger lies even there."

"What do you mean, danger?" Remus demanded. "Why should it be dangerous for her to live in the country where she was conceived?"

"Because she is a wifewolf," said Dumbledore, "and because she is James Potter's daughter. You, Remus, knew James Potter as well as anyone; do you believe that, if he had been born a werewolf, he would have dealt with this fact in the cautious and level-headed manner that made it possible for you to spend seven years at Hogwarts without routinely imperilling your fellow students? Is it not far more probable that he would have exploited the opportunity of assuming another shape to perform what few acts of mayhem were impossible to him as a human?"

For a brief moment, Remus wondered whether Dumbledore had, after all, learned the secret of the Marauders' fifth year, but he suppressed this thought as soon as he became aware of it. If Dumbledore had learned, he would never say it directly, and if he hadn't, there was no need to let one of the world's greatest Legilimens follow the train of thought that his chance comment had started.

"Yes, Professor," he said, "I would say that was exactly what James would do."

Dumbledore nodded. "Now, I do not know how far Rowena will take after her father," he said, "but if she has even a spark of the immortal Prongs inside her, all the dementors in Azkaban will not be able to prevent her from doing as she wills. There will come a night when she will break free of whatever securities are put on her – and then we shall simply have to pray that she does not cause irreparable harm either to herself or to any victim she may find."

"But, Professor," Remus interrupted, "if the picture is as bleak as you paint it, what good can be done by removing her from Britain? It seems to me that the girl you describe would be equally doomed wherever she lived."

"Not quite, Remus," said Dumbledore, his blue eyes narrowing behind his half-moon spectacles. "Consider what would happen if a rogue wifewolf were to run unchecked in, let us say, Brazil. She might manage to bite a few Brazilians; she might attack a chicken coop and rob some poor farmer of his livelihood; she might get hit by a taxicab in São Paulo. But she would not be at all likely to fall in with a pack of her fellow lycanthropes and be turned against humanity as a whole, or to be recognised by a former Death Eater capable of exploiting the curse in her blood. If she stays in Britain, on the other hand, such an outcome is as likely as it is terrible to contemplate. European wizardry is far more formidable than its New-World counterpart, but it is also far more inclined to go bad."

Remus reflected on this. It was not a happy reflection.

"Then are you saying, Professor," he said, "that the best thing for Rowena would be to wait until she's born and then have her removed to Brazil?"

"No," said Dumbledore. "To America, I think. Professor Schwarz has already announced his intention of retiring at the end of term and returning to his art-history post at Cricketshorn, and since Rowena is now in her second month, I think it quite likely that she will be born around the end of May. I shall simply have the good Professor drop by the Linkollew Foundation on his way to the airport, announce himself to be a friend of Mr James Barnett, and pick up the baby, thereby killing two phoenixes with one match. Of course," he added reflectively, "poor Alan will probably have his hands full on his flight back to the States, but it will all be in a good cause, won't it?"

For the first time that day, Remus laughed; the image of his former Muggle Studies teacher attempting to change a diaper was simply priceless. "A very good cause, indeed," he said. "Only…" He hesitated.

"Yes?" said Dumbledore.

"Something just occurred to me," said Remus. "If America has fewer Dark wizards than Britain, surely it also has fewer wizards trained to deal with Dark magic…"

"Just so," said Dumbledore.

"Then how can you be sure," said Remus, "that Professor Schwarz will be able to find a wizard skillful enough in Defense against the Dark Arts to give a were… excuse me, a _wife_wolf a proper upbringing?"

"I don't expect that Professor Schwarz will even look," said Dumbledore calmly. "I intend to have him leave her in a basket in the lobby of O'Hare International Airport, to be adopted by the first person who passes by."

Remus stared at the greatest wizard on Earth, and wondered briefly whether he had been mixing Essence of Insanity with his nightly hot chocolate. He had always known that Albus Dumbledore was a bit of an eccentric, and in 1971 he had had occasion to be grateful for the fact, but this seemed beyond the bounds of all reason.

"Professor, have you lost your mind?" he demanded. "Rowena could end up in anybody's hands that way; a murderer, a gangster, anyone!"

"She could, indeed," said Dumbledore. "On the other hand, she could end up in the hands of a loving, tender, and resourceful family – for it has been my experience that such families are quite astonishingly common in the United States."

"That may be," said Remus, still unable to believe what he was hearing, "but surely, in finding a home for James and Lily's daughter, you don't intend to trust purely to luck?"

"Yes, Remus," said Dumbledore, "that is precisely what I intend to do."

Remus stared for a long moment, but could think of nothing to say. The next words spoken, after an interval of perhaps thirty seconds, were Dumbledore's.

"Of course," said that eminent magico, "I intend to give luck a helping hand. Before Professor Schwarz leaves for Caernarvon, I will call upon Professor Slughorn and have him brew a special dosage of Felix Felicis – one that will be mild enough for an infant's stomach. Professor Schwarz will take this with him on the airplane, and feed it to Rowena when the two of them arrive in Chicago – and then, so long as some suitable candidate changes planes at O'Hare within twenty-four hours, I should think we shall have very little to worry about."

Remus considered this plan. It still seemed rather unnecessarily elaborate to him – why couldn't he simply ask the Headmistress of Cricketshorn to find some suitable family for Rowena? – but he acknowledged that it was not so flagrantly irrational as it had at first appeared.

"I suppose that will work," he murmured vaguely. "Of course, Felix Felicis is famously unreliable, but…"

"Not when Horace brews it," said Dumbledore. "Horace may have his faults, but he has yet to brew a potion that didn't have precisely the desired effect. Almost a shame we're losing him, really."

Remus glanced up, surprised. "Losing him?" he repeated. "Is Professor Slughorn retiring, too?"

Dumbledore nodded. "Yes, we will have two new professors coming in next year," he said. "Or rather, three, but Severus and Charity are the only ones I expect to keep for any length of time…"

"Severus?" Remus repeated. "Severus who?"

"How many Severuses do you know, my dear Lupin?" said Dumbledore.

"Severus _Snape_ will be teaching Potions at Hogwarts?" Remus demanded.

"He won't be teaching Muggle Studies," said Dumbledore with a grin.

"But, Professor," Remus protested, "Severus Snape is…"

"I know what Severus Snape is," said Dumbledore, suddenly becoming stern. "Indeed, I fancy I may know better than you do. Kindly do me the courtesy of assuming that I have sufficient common sense not to wantonly put my students in a position of mortal peril."

It is a mark of how forceful Albus Dumbledore's personality could be when he set his mind to it that Remus, who during the course of their conversation had had several excellent reasons to dispute Dumbledore's allotment of common sense, found this argument so persuasive that he responded only with a chastened, "Very well, Professor."

"Thank you," said Dumbledore. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a number of arrangements that I must see to, and I would advise you to go pay a visit on Madam Pomfrey. You look as though you had a rough night of it last night."

Remus had no particular desire to have Madam Pomfrey dab essence of fennel on his wounds, but the thought occurred to him that there were very probably unoccupied beds in the hospital wing, and it was therefore with genuine enthusiasm that he said, "Thank you, Professor," and turned and headed out of the office.

As he pulled open the door that led to the autokinetic spiral staircase, he overheard Dumbledore whisper to one of the portraits, "Oliver, could you tell Alexandra to expect me in her office in a few minutes? Say… let me see, how shall I put it… say that I wish to discuss the Cuela class of 1999."


	7. Give This Child a Home

_"The captain has turned off the seatbelt sign. Have a good day, and thank you for flying Pan American World Airways."_

"Yes, you'd better be thankful," murmured Juliana Osborn as she gathered her luggage together. "If it weren't for people like my husband, who still believes your company is going to build a space shuttle someday because he saw it in a Kubrick film, you'd probably have already gone out of business."

Nathaniel Osborn, third-generation owner of the illustrious Flaming O Ranch, paid no attention to this slur on his credulity, engrossed as he was in a copy of _Time_ magazine with a Union Jack on the cover. "I've got to find a pay phone," he muttered. "When John hears about this…"

"Nat," said Mrs. Osborn with a sigh, "why should the Senator even care whether the El Salvadoran congress doesn't want to sell its cattle land to sharecroppers?"

"First of all, Julie, it's not a congress," said Mr. Osborn. "It's a Constituent Assembly. And second, if the Reagan administration wants to send these people 200 million dollars' worth of aid next year, and they're turning out to be a bunch of crooks I wouldn't trust with my daughter's lunch money, I think anyone who's going to have to vote on that aid ought to know about it."

His wife winced slightly. "Well, if it's that important," she said, "don't you think that Alan Cranston has already told him about it? That is a whip's job, after all: to make sure all the party members know about the mortal threats to American freedom that the opposition party and their dago lackeys are cooking up together behind closed doors in the El Salvadoran embassy."

Mr. Osborn glanced up from his magazine. "Do I detect a note of sarcasm in my helpmate's voice?" he enquired.

"You detect a forty-three-year-old woman with arthritis," Mrs. Osborn replied, "who expects her bull-wrestling husband to help her carry their suitcases into the lobby, rather than sit there with his nose in a magazine and think about what he's going to say to John Melcher about Central American politics the next time they meet."

"All right, all right," said Mr. Osborn, folding up his magazine and stuffing it in his pocket. "Which ones do you want me to take?"

* * *

Between the two of them, the Osborns got their luggage out of Pan Am Flight 71 and into the lobby of O'Hare International Airport. It was fairly obvious, however, that Mr. Osborn's heart was still in San Salvador with the disenfranchised tenant farmers, and when he told his wife that he was going to see if he could get through to the U. S. Capitol from an O'Hare pay phone, she made no move to dissuade him.

The truth of the matter was that Juliana Osborn was rather perturbed with her husband. This had nothing to do with his denunciations of the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista's recent maneuverings; as she had indicated, she neither knew the first thing nor cared in the slightest about Central American agricultural policy. What had pierced her to the heart was his offhand description of the D'Aubuisson coalition as "a bunch of crooks I wouldn't trust with my daughter's lunch money": for the truth was that the Osborns had neither daughter nor son, and Mrs. Osborn had felt this lack keenly throughout their twenty-one years of marriage.

Even now, seventeen years after she had received the diagnosis, she could still remember every detail of the scene: the unpleasantly tangy smell of the examining room, the light-blue print dress she had been wearing (she had never worn that dress again, although she had been rather fond of it up to that day), and most of all Dr. Ruark's painfully hesitant manner: "I'm sorry, Mrs. Osborn… no one had been hoping more than myself that I was wrong…" If he had simply come out and said it, perhaps she would have been able to handle it better – although, admittedly, there was perhaps no good way of telling an only child who had spent her entire life dreaming of taking care of a baby sibling that this dream would not be realized in her adult life, either.

They had looked into adoption, of course, but that had turned out to be a flat impossibility. The Osborns were not poor, but they didn't have the sort of fortunes at their fingertips that adoption agencies seemed to expect people to lay down in return for their services. (When the _Roe v. Wade_ decision had come down in 1973, and she had heard her husband's friends in the state Democratic party arguing in favor of it on the grounds that "there were so many unwanted children in America", it had taken all her self-control to keep from going out and registering as a Republican.)

So she had lived the last seventeen years with an aching cavity in her heart, one that no amount of time and distractions had quite been able to heal – and the frustrating part was that her husband appeared to be completely unaware of this. For the owner of a thousand-acre ranch that had been passed down from father to son for three generations, Nathaniel Osborn seemed remarkably indifferent to his own lack of an heir (Juliana suspected he was planning to pass the Flaming O on to his cowhand Jeffrey DePinto's son Frederick), and his occasional matter-of-fact references to the subject only served to inflame his wife's pathetic, hopeless longing for a little human soul to call her own, to care for and tend to, to hold it when it cried and…

Mrs. Osborn frowned, and shook her head. Probably it was just her worked-up imagination playing tricks on her, but she could have sworn that she had actually heard an infant cry just then. She paused, and cocked her head to listen.

Yes, there it was again. A baby's cry, unmistakably – and apparently coming from underneath the very chair where Nathaniel had just put his suitcase. Slowly, wincing somewhat at the hardness of the lobby carpeting, Mrs. Osborn lowered herself onto her knees and peeked under the chair.

The next moment her world was unmade.

A tiny baby girl – she couldn't have weighed more than six pounds – was squirming uncomfortably inside a large wicker basket. She had a small, pert nose and a few strands of light-red hair crisscrossing her otherwise bare head, but Mrs. Osborn barely noticed these. It was hard to focus on anything other than her eyes – her almond-shaped, startlingly green eyes, like small, inquisitive emeralds. Lily Potter's body might have been moldering in the grave for seven months, but the eyes that had stolen Severus Snape's heart were still very much alive – and at this moment, they stole Juliana Osborn's.

Slowly, like someone in a beautiful dream who fears to move lest she wake herself up, she took hold of the edges of the basket and drew it out from under the chair. The baby didn't seem to object to this treatment; indeed, she appeared to take an immediate liking to Mrs. Osborn, giggling and extending her arms as her face came into view. Mrs. Osborn, enchanted, lifted her up and cradled her in her arms, and, as she felt the baby moving sleepily against her bosom, her heart was filled so full with ecstasy that it seemed to her she would die from pure happiness where she stood.

It was perhaps fortunate, then, that at this juncture Mr. Osborn returned, spinning his phone card in his hand and wearing a frown. "I got through to John," he said. "He's already had an earful about the land reform from Cranston. And don't say 'I told you so', or I'm going to have to…"

He broke off, and blinked as he took in the odd spectacle of his wife on her knees on the lobby floor, cradling a small baby girl wrapped in a red-and-gold blanket. "Well, now," he said, "and who might this be?"

Mrs. Osborn glanced up dreamily. "Hmm?" she said. "Oh. I don't know who this is. She was lying in that basket underneath your chair, and I just thought…"

"This basket?" said Mr. Osborn, kicking at the wickerwork construction at his feet.

Mrs. Osborn nodded.

"Well, did you consider reading the note inside it?" her husband enquired.

"Is there a note?" said Mrs. Osborn, with a wholly uninterested vagueness. Notes were not the sort of thing she cared about just now.

"There is, indeed," said Mr. Osborn, bending over, reaching into the basket, and pulling out a small scrap of what appeared to be parchment. "It says… hang on a minute, let me just get my glasses on here… ah, here we go." The thin, slanted writing on the note popped into focus, and he read the words aloud:

_My greetings and blessings to whoever finds this child. She is the daughter of two of my most honoured comrades, who have now, regrettably, passed on to a state in which they can no longer give her the care she needs. It is my hope that you, whoever you may be, will have the courage, the cunning, and, most of all, the compassion necessary to give her a safe, healthy, and happy childhood. I beg of you: do not fail her. –A.D._

Beneath this, in a different hand, a much briefer message was written to the same effect:

_Take care of Rowena. –R.L._

When Mr. Osborn had finished reading these two passages, he took a deep breath and glanced at his wife over his reading glasses. "Well, what do you think, Julie?" he said wryly. "Can we do this little favor for Mr. A.D. and Ms. R.L.?"

"'Rowena'?" Mrs. Osborn murmured, staring down at the baby in her arms. "I was thinking of her more as a Margaret."

Mr. Osborn correctly deduced that this meant "yes", and grinned. "Well, we could make that her middle name," he said. "Rowena Margaret Osborn; it's got a kind of ring to it."

"Rowena Margaret Osborn," his wife repeated. "Do you like that name, Rowena Margaret Osborn?"

Rowena Margaret Osborn expressed no comment on her new appellation. Jet lag had caught up with her, and she had fallen asleep on her new mother's breast, squirming every now and then as she wandered through the sorts of dreams that Felix Felicis gives to five-day-old infants.

A practical thought struck Mr. Osborn. "I wonder if she's going to get hungry on the flight back to Helena," he said. "We've got a two-hour layover; I suppose I should look around and try to bum a bottle of formula off of someone."

A look of mock indignation crossed Mrs. Osborn's face. "You're going to give her _formula_?" she said. "Why, Nathaniel Osborn, you reactionary child-poisoner! Don't you know that all the modern, natural, holistic babies are breast-fed?"

"Listen, Julie," Mr. Osborn sighed, "if you want to hire a wet nurse when we get back to Flatwillow, that's your business, but in the meantime I'm not going to let a bunch of nutritionists talk me into letting my foster daughter starve during a two-hour flight. Somehow, I don't think A.D. and R.L. would approve of that."

Mrs. Osborn sighed. "Oh, very well," she said. "Have it your way."

"Thank you, I will," said Mr. Osborn. "I should be back in about an hour. Don't go anywhere till I come back." And he was gone.

"Who wants to go anywhere?" murmured Mrs. Osborn, rocking her newfound baby in her arms. "I've already found what I was looking for."

And Rowena knew, on some basic, infantile level, that she had, too.

* * *

And someone else knew it as well. In the neighboring lobby area, a middle-aged man of academic appearance, dressed in a long, gray overcoat and wearing a scraggly beard, poked his head down from the partition where he had been watching the Osborn tableau, took a paper out of his pocket, and wrote the following letter:

_Well, Prof. Dumbledore, you win again. Rowena's just been taken in, and from what I can see of her new parents, they're exactly the sort of people an orphaned werewolf (or wifewolf, or whatever she is) wants to have adopt her. I'm sorry I ever doubted you – or Horace, for that matter._

_Give the new faculty members my best wishes, and tell Charity that I hope she has a quieter tenure than I did. I don't suppose I'll ever see you again in this life, but here's hoping that "in the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore." Yours ever, A. G. Schwarz._


	8. Back at the Ranch

Pan Am Flight 233 to Billings, Montana, was delayed for nearly an hour by engine problems, and there was a spot of trouble at Billings Logan International Airport involving a difference of opinion between Mr. Osborn and a young man handing out Larry Williams pamphlets, so Rowena did not actually arrive at her new home until around midnight, Rocky Mountain time. It therefore came as something of a surprise to Mrs. Osborn that Jeff DePinto came out to meet her as she trudged up the walkway to the ranch house, carrying her sleeping foster daughter in her arms.

"Evening, Mrs. O.," said the middle-aged farmhand. "Have a good time in Savannah?"

"Oh, yes, it was fine," said Mrs. Osborn, and sighed. "Certainly better than our most recent stopover, anyway. I swear, I never want to hear the words 'Laffer curve' again."

"A-ha," said DePinto. "That's why you've got back so late, is it?"

Mrs. Osborn nodded. "Yes, blame it all on Nat," she said. "But what are you doing up so late, Jeff?"

DePinto shrugged. "The Duchess started having her calf at around four o'clock," he said, "and, for some reason, it decided to come out hind-legs-first, so I spent most of the past eight hours out in the pasture with Dr. Kalas." He shook his head. "I tell you, Mrs. O., you don't know what spunk is until you've seen a 105-pound woman try to shove an 80-pound calf back into its mother's womb and turn it around."

Mrs. Osborn smiled. "Yes, Susannah's quite a gal," she said. "So did it turn out all right?"

"Oh, yeah, everything came out fine in the end," DePinto said. "The little guy hit soil around eleven, just as frisky as anything; he'd probably be running around the fields right now, if his mother hadn't insisted on heading back to her stall after she'd let him suck a few minutes."

"A sensible beast," Mrs. Osborn murmured, and stumbled slightly with fatigue. DePinto's sense of gallantry was aroused, and he stepped forward to offer her a hand up the porch steps. It was then that he got his first good look at the figure in her arms.

"Well, now," he said, staring down at the slumbering infant, "and who might this be?"

"Oh," said Mrs. Osborn, with a smile. "This is Rowena."

DePinto arched his eyebrows. "There must be something in that Southern air," he said. "I hadn't even heard a whisper of this when you left."

"Oh, she's not ours," said Mrs. Osborn. "Or, rather, she's ours now, but she wasn't ours when… you know. What I mean is, someone left her in a basket in the O'Hare lobby, and I guess we were the first people to come along, so…" She shrugged eloquently.

"You're kidding," said DePinto.

Mrs. Osborn shook her head.

"Well, what do you know?" said DePinto. "Just like something out of one of those old books, Dickens or somebody. Is that why you called her Rowena, after one of those old heroines?"

"Oh, we didn't call her Rowena," said Mrs. Osborn. "That was the name they gave her in the note."

"Oh, there was a note in the basket?"

Mrs. Osborn nodded.

"Any name on it?"

"Just initials," said Mrs. Osborn. "A.D. and R.L."

"Ah," said DePinto. "Illegitimate, was she?"

"What?" said Mrs. Osborn, startled.

"Well, if one of her parents has a last name starting with D and the other has a last name starting with L…"

"No, no, no," said Mrs. Osborn, shaking her head. "The note wasn't left by her parents. Her parents are dead."

DePinto blinked. "How do you know that?"

"It said so in the note," said Mrs. Osborn.

"Oh."

"At least, I think it did," said Mrs. Osborn, trying to remember the exact words. "Anyway, it said that they had 'passed on into a state where they could no longer give her the care she needed', and what else could that mean?"

DePinto shrugged. "Divorce," he said. "Insanity. Losing a fortune in the stock market, and wanting a better future for their daughter than as a bag lady on the streets of Chicago."

"And anyway, A.D. couldn't be one of her parents," said Mrs. Osborn, ignoring these suggestions. "He referred to her parents as 'two of my most honored colleagues'. He wouldn't have referred to himself as a colleague of his."

"No, probably not," DePinto agreed. "How about R.L.?"

Mrs. Osborn hesitated. Strictly speaking, it was impossible to say whether the message "Take care of Rowena. –R.L." had come from a parent or not, but for some reason – possibly because it gave a kind of concreteness to the whole situation if she knew her daughter's original last initial – she found the idea attractive.

"R.L. could be her mother," she allowed.

"Could have been her mother, you mean," came a voice from behind her. She turned around and saw Osborn _père_ clambering up the steps, carrying two suitcases, an ironing board, and the crate of Gerber brand baby formula he had bought in Chicago.

"I don't know what her old mother's initials were," he said, "but her current mother's initials are J.O."

Mrs. Osborn beamed.

"Here, Mr. O., let me help you with that," said DePinto, reaching forward and taking the ironing board and one of the suitcases.

"Thanks, Jeff," said Mr. Osborn. "I don't know what you're doing up at this hour, but I'm glad to see you."

"The Duchess had her calf," said Mrs. Osborn.

"Is that so?" said her husband. "Well, well, two new arrivals in twenty-four hours. May 30 seems to have been quite a day for the Osborn household."

"We'll have to throw a party when it comes around next year," Mrs. Osborn suggested.

"Absolutely," Mr. Osborn agreed. "Maybe we can bake a little cake with A.D.R.L. on it in red icing, or…"

A muffled curse interrupted him. Husband and wife turned toward the door, and saw DePinto hastily replacing the flowerpot that he had knocked off the patio table with the ironing board while attempting to turn around.

"Stupid thing," he muttered. "What were you doing with an ironing board, anyway, Mr. O.?"

Mr. Osborn rolled his eyes. "It's a gift from Julie's mother," he said. "Apparently she thinks her delicate little Southern blossom is forgetting how to be domestic and feminine, out here in the hardscrabble prairies."

"So she gave her an ironing board," said DePinto.

"Right."

DePinto shrugged. "Well, it's her money, I guess," he said. "Though it'd probably have been more useful if she'd gotten a crib or something…"

Mrs. Osborn uttered an exclamation. "A crib!" she said. "Oh, I'm such an idiot! Of course we'll need a crib!" She turned on her husband. "Nat, why didn't you tell me we'd need a crib?"

DePinto chuckled at the look of uncertain guilt on his employer's face. "Relax, Mrs. O.," he said. "I'm pretty sure Ronnie and I still have Frederick's old crib down in the basement somewhere. Rowena can use that until she has her own."

Mrs. Osborn's face lightened, and she sighed. "Oh, Jeff, you're an angel," she said. "Would it be a terrible imposition to ask you to get it now?"

"Not at all," said DePinto. "Back in a jiff." He dropped the suitcase and ironing board onto the patio table, hopped down from the porch, and headed for the small log house where he, his wife (whose name was actually Veronica, although nobody but her mother ever called her this), and their nine-year-old son lived as tenants on the Osborn land.

He returned in about fifteen minutes, carrying a blue wicker bassinet. "Here you go," he said. "Not especially girly, but hey, it's the hardscrabble prairies, right?"

"My sentiments exactly," said Mr. Osborn, taking it from him. He was briefly surprised at how much it weighed; then he looked down and realized, with a grin, that DePinto had thrown in a blanket, a rattle, and a large book of illustrated fairy tales. _I knew we hired this fellow for a reason,_ he thought.

"Where should we put her, do you think?" he enquired of his wife. "Guest bedroom?"

Mrs. Osborn shook her head. "No, that's too far from our room," she said. "If she wakes up in the middle of the night, I need to be able to get to her. We'd do better to set her up in the game room until she's three or four."

_She sounds as though she's been planning this for decades,_ Mr. Osborn thought. For the first time, he began to realize just how many of his wife's prayers Rowena had been an answer to.

"Okay, then," he said. "Game room it is."

* * *

And the game room, a few minutes later, it was. Mrs. Osborn set up the crib at the end of the eastern wall, as close to the master bedroom as possible, and laid Rowena inside, draping DePinto's blanket gently over her slumbering form. Even Mr. Osborn, who had hitherto accepted Rowena as an adoptive daughter more out of love for his wife and an inarticulate sense of obligation to the mysterious A.D. and R.L. than because of any especial affection for the child herself, had to admit that she was utterly adorable in that particular setting.

"Of course," he added to DePinto, "I don't know what we're going to do about those late-night pool games now…"

"Well, maybe tomorrow the two of you can take the pool table up to the guest bedroom," said Mrs. Osborn unconcernedly.

"Are you crazy, woman?" said Mr. Osborn. "Two middle-aged men trying to lug a half-ton piece of furniture up a flight of stairs? I know I've preserved a preternaturally youthful appearance, but my back is still forty-four."

DePinto yawned. "Well, we can worry about that tomorrow," he said. "Meantime, I'm going to turn in, if that's all right with you."

"Oh, of course, Jeff, go ahead," said Mrs. Osborn. "I'm sorry we kept you so late."

"Not at all, Mrs. O.," said DePinto graciously. "If a man can't share in his employer's joys and sorrows, why, then, he's in the wrong business, that's what I say. Anyway, g'night to you all." And he turned around and clomped out of the game room.

Mr. Osborn stretched. "I think I'll hit the hay, too," he said. "You coming, Julie?"

"You go ahead, Nat," said Mrs. Osborn. "I'll be there in a few minutes."

Mr. Osborn nodded and left the room, and his wife turned her attention back to the figure in the crib. "Rowena," she murmured. "Nathaniel and Juliana Osborn are proud to announce the arrival of their daughter, Rowena Margaret, on May 30, 1982." She laughed, and shook her head. "What will Mother say, I wonder?"


	9. The Metamorphosis

As it turned out, when Mrs. Osborn's mother – a good-natured, seventyish woman named Vanessa Ford – learned that her daughter and son-in-law had become de-facto foster parents during their stopover in Chicago, she received the news with much rejoicing. Apart from a tongue-in-cheek complaint that they might have arranged to find Rowena during their outbound flight, so that she could have gotten to see her new granddaughter in the flesh rather than having to get pictures mailed to her, all of her numerous comments on the subject were enthusiastic: she thought that Rowena Margaret Osborn was the loveliest name a baby could hope for, she was fascinated by the mystery of A.D. and R.L., she applauded her daughter's good sense in placing the crib in the game room, and she dismissed her concerns about Rowena's unusually small size with the remark that "the small ones are the sweetest". (Mrs. Osborn, who at her own birth had weighed in at eight pounds and twelve ounces, was not entirely sure she appreciated that last comment, but she recognized the good intentions behind it.)

Rowena's paternal family was a little harder to win over. The Osborns had always been a relentlessly practical breed, and when Mrs. Osborn had called up Nat's sister Mandy to convey the good news, Mandy had spent nearly the entire call warning her of all the difficulties involved in getting oneself declared the legal parent of someone to whom one had not personally given birth.

"Your problem is that you don't really know the state of the parents," she said. "There's no legal proof that they're dead, or incapacitated, or anything; all you know is that this A.D. person thinks they can't take care of her anymore. You'll need a pretty sympathetic judge if you expect that to sway him – or, for that matter, if you expect him to overlook the issue of your ages. Most adoption courts don't exactly consider it a plus when the prospective foster parents are in their mid-forties and have never raised a child before."

Mrs. Osborn had to admit that these were valid concerns. Still, as she pointed out, Mr. Osborn was well-known to be one of Petroleum County's more upstanding citizens, so there was no reason not to expect Judge Dellon to have sympathy for his case – particularly, she added, as Judge Dellon himself had just recently become the father of a baby girl at the tender age of sixty-one. At that, Mandy laughed, expressed regret at having missed that bit of Flatwillow gossip, and turned the conversation to other matters.

So for a few days, everything was sunshine and violins at the Flaming O Ranch. It wasn't until the evening of June 6 that the Osborns discovered the fly in their otherwise delightful little ointment.

* * *

It had been a long day for Nathaniel Osborn. One of the young she-calves had wandered through a hole in the eastern fencing and had gotten nearly a mile off the ranch before he and Jeff had caught up with her. Then, when they brought her back, they found that one of the steers had attempted to follow her, and had gotten his leg rather painfully entangled in the barbed wire, so they had had to pry him loose from that and fix up the fencing before anything else happened. Then there had been a bunch of brush that needed clearing out on the northern end of the land, and some fool named Drummond had dropped by to say that he was looking for a supplier of organically raised meats and that "the Flamingo Ranch had come specially recommended", and, in general, all the daily labors that were part of ranching life had seemed just a little bit more arduous that day. By half past nine that evening, therefore, Mr. Osborn was pretty nearly dead on his feet; he flopped into bed without even bothering to take his clothes off, and, when Mrs. Osborn poked her head into the bedroom to say that she was going to check on Rowena before retiring, he barely had the strength to nod in acknowledgment.

Ten seconds later, he had nearly drifted off for the night. Twenty seconds later, he was back on his feet and scrambling for his rifle.

The reason for this was quite simple. As he was slipping into Morpheus's realm, his auditory centers (which are, in any good frontiersman, the very last things to go offline for the night) had picked up a sudden, loud, high-pitched noise. Because he was so nearly asleep, it took him almost three seconds to recognize that it was the sound of his wife screaming in the game room.

Montana trains her sons well. Within fifteen seconds, Mr. Osborn had darted into the closet, laid his hands on his trusty Winchester (for a firm conviction in favor of the Second Amendment coexisted quite comfortably in Nathaniel Osborn's mind with staunchly liberal views on everything else in the world), and raced out of his bedroom and into the game room, ready to pump a round of lead into whatever nocturnal marauder was daring to menace his womenfolk.

When he got into the room, however, he found it to be completely empty of nocturnal marauders – or, so far as he could tell, of anything else that might have provoked his wife to terror. For a moment, he was nonplussed; then he turned around and realized that Mrs. Osborn was staring, deathly pale, at the crib where she had laid Rowena an hour or so before. He turned his gaze in this direction, and suddenly realized what had frightened Julie so badly.

For there, in the crib where his foster daughter ought to have been sleeping, lay a sleek, grey form that his farmer's brain instantly identified as that of a baby wolf.

That her husband should have burst into the game room, armed and ready to fire, within half a minute of her hysterical outburst did not surprise Mrs. Osborn in the least. Nor did she find it extraordinary that, on finding the room utterly still, he should have lowered his rifle, turned to her in puzzlement, and then followed her gaze to the crib and realized the position of affairs. What took her completely by surprise was what he did next.

For the expression that came over Mr. Osborn's face upon finding a sleeping wolf pup in his daughter's crib was not, as his wife might have expected, simple bewildered outrage, but a mixture of wonder, hesitation, and what appeared to be mortal terror. Furthermore, instead of slamming his rifle butt on the floor and roundly cursing his stupidity in leaving the back door unlocked, the fiendish sense of humor some kidnappers had, and (for good measure) James Watt's sympathy for would-be developers of wilderness areas, he tiptoed over to the window, stared out at the full moon gleaming above the horizon, and smiled dourly. "Well, here's something A.D. and R.L. forgot to tell us," he said.

"Pardon?" said Mrs. Osborn vaguely.

"Isn't it obvious?" said Mr. Osborn. "We find a mysterious baby at the airport, we take her in, and then on the night of the full moon we go to check on her and find she's turned into a wolf. The only question left is, who do we call first, Robert Ripley or Dr. Van Helsing?"

Mrs. Osborn blinked. "Nat," she said, "are you trying to… I mean… that animal in Rowena's crib… are you trying to say that that is Rowena?"

"Don't look so surprised, Julie," said Mr. Osborn dryly. "Anyone would think you'd never seen a werewolf before."

Slowly, the idea began to sink into Mrs. Osborn's mind. "A werewolf," she murmured. "There really are such things?"

"If I was in my right mind, I'd say no," said Mr. Osborn, "but I'm a little zonked just now, so I'm ready to believe anything. Besides, when you think about it, it explains quite a bit, doesn't it?"

"Yes," Mrs. Osborn murmured, "yes, I suppose it does..."

Suddenly, without warning, she began to laugh. "Oh, thank heavens," she said.

Mr. Osborn blinked. "Thank heavens?" he repeated.

"Here I was getting so worried," said Mrs. Osborn, "thinking that someone had kidnapped Rowena and left a dog or something in her place, when she was there all the time. Oh, the poor dear." And she extended a hand toward the crib, the affectionate mother reaching out to her afflicted child.

The next moment, she leaped back, aghast. Mr. Osborn, with more violence than she had ever seen him exhibit in twenty-one years of marriage, had sprung forward and thrust the butt of his rifle between her hand and the sleeping Rowena-wolf.

"Get back!" he hissed.

It took Mrs. Osborn a moment to find her voice. "Nathaniel Osborn, have you gone crazy?" she demanded.

"Who's crazy?" said Mr. Osborn. "You're the one who was trying to wake up a sleeping werewolf."

"I'm her mother!" said Mrs. Osborn.

"You think she's going to remember that in this state?" said her husband. "The whole point of being a werewolf is that you lose your humanity. She wakes up now and sees you leaning over her crib, all she's going to see is a big, juicy piece of human flesh."

"Oh, I see," said Mrs. Osborn. "And you think that that tiny little thing is going to be able to leap out of her crib, pin me to the ground, and start tearing me apart with those itty-bitty teeth?" (She pointed to Rowena's exposed canines, which were, indeed, quite bitty.)

"No," said Mr. Osborn, "but I do think she'll be able to bite you – and I don't know about you, but I'm going to have a tough enough time just being the father of a werewolf. I'd rather not be married to one, if it's all the same to you."

Mrs. Osborn blinked. "What?"

Mr. Osborn sighed. "Honestly, Julie, doesn't anybody tell campfire stories in Georgia?" he said. "A person who gets bitten by a werewolf becomes a werewolf himself. You pick up Rowena right now, that means you."

Mrs. Osborn was silent for a moment, as the immensity of their problem dawned on her. "What are we going to do, then?" she said. "She's not going to stay a baby forever; what are we going to do when she gets older and starts staying up late?"

"Oh, that shouldn't be too much of a problem," said Mr. Osborn with a shrug. "We own fifteen thousand acres, after all; in fact, I'm pretty sure I walked most of them today. When Rowena gets bigger, we'll just send her out somewhere near the middle of the pasture on full-moon nights; then when she transforms, she'll have no one to bother except old Minos, and even a werewolf wouldn't dare mess with him."

Mrs. Osborn looked dubious. "Would that be safe for her?" she said. "I mean, a little girl, as soon as she's old enough to walk, going out into this big, empty field, three or four miles from any other human beings, right nearby to a bull's pen…"

"Well, maybe Jeff can ride her out there, make sure she's settled down all right, and then race back to the house before the moon rises," Mr. Osborn offered. "Then he can pick her up again the next morning, and everybody'll be happy."

"Maybe," Mrs. Osborn agreed. There was not, however, a great deal of conviction in her voice.

Then a thought struck her. "And speaking of Jeff, I'll bet he was right about Rowena's parents."

"Eh?" said Mr. Osborn.

"When we brought her home that evening," Mrs. Osborn said. "You remember, I was talking to him while you were bringing the luggage up? He said that her parents might not have been dead – that that whole unable-to-give-her-the-care-she-needs business might have just meant that they'd divorced or gone broke or something."

"And you think that's what it was?" said Mr. Osborn.

His wife shook her head. "No," she said. "I think her parents were werewolves, too – they must have been, mustn't they? – and that something had happened to them that caused their wolf minds to overthrow their human minds, even when the moon wasn't full. Probably that scrawled bit of writing that R.L. put on the note was the last thing she ever wrote as a sane woman. And that's why A.D. was so vague about what had happened to them; he didn't want to scare us off."

"Could be," Mr. Osborn agreed. "Or he might just not have wanted us to think he was crazy – because, let's face it, that's what we would have thought if the note had talked about baby werewolves. Heck, I think it's crazy even now; if I wasn't seeing it with my own eyes…"

His gaze drifted to the crib in front of him. Mrs. Osborn's followed it, and a silence descended upon the ranch-house game room – a silence that was broken only when Mr. Osborn yawned widely about twenty seconds later.

"Well, anyway," he said, "we can worry about all that in the morning. Right now, I'm going to bed."

Mrs. Osborn rubbed her eyes. "A good thought," she said. "I believe I'll join you."

* * *

As Mr. Osborn was slipping into his bathrobe, a disturbing thought occurred to him. "Say, Julie," he said. "You don't suppose Rowena's parents are going to come looking for her, do you?"

Mrs. Osborn frowned. "Why should they?" she said. "They don't even know what state she lives in."

"You never know, with mythical creatures," said Mr. Osborn darkly. "They might have some kind of psychic link to her that makes them able to smell her a thousand miles away."

Mrs. Osborn smiled tolerantly. "Well, it's possible, I suppose," she said. "I don't think it's likely, though."

"Maybe not," said Mr. Osborn, "but it never hurts to be prepared." His eyes strayed to the top closet shelf where his rifle lay. "Which is why, first thing tomorrow morning, I'm driving down to Engelbrecht's and seeing if they stock silver shells."


	10. Silver Doesn't Lie

Ordinarily, Mr. Osborn woke well before sunrise, but the following morning, due to the exhaustion of the previous day and the fact that the sun rises quite early in Montana in June, a golden glow was already bathing the ranch house's master bedroom when his eyes finally fluttered open. For a moment, he started to panic, thinking of all the cows that must have been lowing for their morning milking, but then he set his concerns firmly aside; a man had a right to one lazy morning in forty-four years, and he had certainly earned a few extra winks after the absurd commotion last night. (It was too early in the morning to make the effort of remembering what the commotion had been about, but he knew it had been absurd.)

He rolled over and stared at his still-sleeping wife, and thought that she had never seemed so beautiful as she did now. The graceful lines of her face, the pale smoothness of her skin, the long, black hair that lay askew about her shoulders, were all wondrously accentuated by the sunbeams that the morning poured like molten gold over her unconscious form. Even the encroaching tints of silver in her hair seemed like something scattered down from Olympus.

_Not, of course,_ he reminded himself (for he was a fair man, even in his private thoughts), _that there's anything wrong with silver hair. In the right context, it can be pretty breathtaking in its own right. Just look at wolves._And then his mouth fell open, for, with that word, all the details of the previous evening had come rushing back unbidden into his mind. But no – that couldn't have actually happened, could it? Werewolves were creatures of legend and bad cinema; they didn't actually exist. They certainly didn't lie in baskets in O'Hare International Airport, waiting to be found by passing ranchers' wives. No, it had to have been a dream.

Though if it had been a dream, it had been an awfully realistic one. Mr. Osborn believed he could remember every detail of the incident, right down to the smell of his rifle (which really needed oiling, now that he was thinking about it). Why, he could even remember that the Rowena-wolf's tail had had a peculiar tuft at the end of it – which didn't seem like the sort of detail his subconscious mind would have made up on its own.

Mr. Osborn frowned reflectively for a moment, then decided to make an objective test. He rose from the bed, went over to his dresser drawer, and pulled out the silver William Jennings Bryan medallion that he had inherited from his grandfather. (Jeremiah Osborn had gotten it at a Bryan rally during the 1900 campaign; it had been the high point of the future Flaming O founder's early life when he had gotten to see the Great Commoner in person.)

Holding this as though it were a talisman, he tiptoed out of the bedroom and into the game room, where he leaned over and peeked into Rowena's crib. A less wolf-like child than the one who lay therein would have been hard to imagine, and Mr. Osborn was tempted to dismiss the whole idea as a fantasy and go back to bed, but he told himself firmly that he had come into this room for a purpose, and he wasn't going to leave it until that purpose, however stupid it might be, was accomplished.

Gently, he reached into the crib, picked up his foster daughter's right arm, and pressed the Bryan medallion against the tip of her middle finger.

* * *

Mrs. Osborn was in the middle of a confused dream in which she and R.L. were fighting each other for Rowena's blanket when she was woken by a sudden, high-pitched wail from across the hallway. Like her husband the previous night, she was awake in a moment; throwing a thin robe over her nightgown, she sprinted into the game room, and there found her husband standing over her daughter's crib, holding some sort of large coin in his right hand and wearing an expression of grim validation on his face.

"Nat!" she exclaimed, reaching into the cradle and pressing the distraught Rowena to her bosom. "What's going on here?"

"Just a little experiment," said Mr. Osborn. "I thought I'd check to see whether Rowena responds to the touch of silver the same way others of her kind do."

"Her kind?" said Mrs. Osborn, puzzled. Then she remembered the events of the past night, and her eyes widened. "Oh," she said. "Oh, yes, I see. And, um, does she?"

"Look for yourself," said Mr. Osborn. "Third finger, right hand."

Mrs. Osborn glanced down at the tiny hand that was picking clumsily at the edge of her robe. At the tip of the third finger was a small, red blotch; it was scarcely bigger than a pinprick, but, judging from the way Rowena was keeping that finger as far splayed out from the rest as her infantile motor skills could manage, it was evidently causing her significant discomfort.

"Is that what it looks like when a werewolf touches silver?" said Mrs. Osborn, frowning. "I always pictured something more... I don't know, more ghastly somehow."

"Well, maybe if I'd stabbed her with one of your mother's old serving forks, it would have been," said Mr. Osborn, "but I guess there's a limit to how much damage you can do with a 19th-century campaign token." And he slipped the Bryan medallion through his fingers and pocketed it.

"It almost looks like an allergic reaction of some kind," said Mrs. Osborn, examining the affected area critically. "I wonder if we'll have to put that on her school forms: 'Allergies: ragweed, penicillin, silver.'"

"Don't be ridiculous, Julie," said her husband. "No Osborn's ever been allergic to ragweed."

Mrs. Osborn gave him a look, which he ignored. "Besides," he said, "I think you're looking too far ahead."

"Oh?"

Mr. Osborn nodded gravely. "Superintendent Argenbright isn't the elected official who can cause us the most grief right now," he said. "That distinction goes to the Honorable John P. Dellon."

"Judge Dellon?" said Mrs. Osborn. "That's right – he's hearing our case today, isn't he?"

Mr. Osborn nodded. "And sure as God made little green apples," he said, "he's going to ask us if we know of any special needs Rowena has – and I can just imagine the look on his face when we tell him."


	11. The Hearing

The look on Judge Dellon's face was a mixture of annoyance that his court was being made mock of and concern that one of Petroleum County's most prominent citizens had apparently gone quite far off the deep end.

"A werewolf?" he said.

Mr. Osborn nodded.

"As in, she turns into a wild animal when the moon is full and runs around terrorizing innocent citizens?"

"Well, she's not doing much running around just yet," said Mr. Osborn, with a nod toward the baby in his wife's arms, "but yes, that's the general idea."

Judge Dellon took a deep breath. "All right, Mr. Osborn," he said. "I don't consider myself a particularly narrow-minded man, but may I just ask: how on Earth can you expect me to believe that?"

"Did I say I expected you to believe it, Your Honor?" said Mr. Osborn. "You asked me a question, and I gave you the most accurate answer I could give. You can believe it or not believe it as you see fit, but you must realize that I couldn't in good conscience tell you anything else."

That was, in fact, precisely what was causing Judge Dellon concern. He knew that Nathaniel Osborn was one of the soberest and most trustworthy men he'd ever met, and that he had, moreover, an unshakable respect for the majesty of the law. If he said something in a courtroom, you could bet that he believed it to be the simple truth – and if it was something that Judge Dellon couldn't possibly believe, then the only conclusion he could draw was that Nathaniel Osborn (and presumably his wife, too) had gone utterly mad.

And if that were the case, then he obviously couldn't give the two of them custody of the girl. If he did, it would only be a matter of time before she was found lying at a crossroads with a silver bullet in her brain. Granted, neither of them looked homicidal yet, but these things were known to be progressive.

He hesitated, nonetheless. It wasn't so much because the Osborns didn't look insane; he knew quite well that the mad could be more self-controlled than the sane when they need to be. Rather, it was because, if they were sane (which wasn't possible, of course, but if they were), then it was a monstrous thing he was about to do, and he knew it when he looked into Mrs. Osborn's eyes. He thought of his own month-old daughter, and imagined what he and his wife would think if Governor Schwinden had taken custody of her from them and made her a ward of the state – and he reflected that he, unlike Mrs. Osborn, had already had three children.

Still, he knew his duty, and he was just opening his mouth to pronounce a verdict when a voice from the back of the courtroom said, "Excuse me, Your Honor, could I have a word?"

Judge Dellon glanced up, and, along with his two plaintiffs, turned his gaze toward the speaker. It was a man of about thirty-five, short and thin but sturdily built, with a close-trimmed beard and eyes that seemed a trifle too big for his face. He wore a black-leather jacket over a plaid flannel shirt and a faded, tattered pair of denims, and he stood by the door to the courtroom with an air of being ready to deal with anyone who should happen to burst through it with a machine gun.

Judge Dellon frowned. "Your name, sir?" he said.

"Call me Bishop," said the man. His voice had a flat, Midwestern sound to it; Pennsylvania, Judge Dellon thought, or possibly Ohio.

"I see," he said. "And what is your interest in this case, Mr. Bishop?"

"I have certain information that might possibly affect Your Honor's verdict," said the man. "However, I am not at liberty to divulge this information to the Osborns themselves, so I would ask Your Honor if we could meet in his chambers."

Judge Dellon pursed his lips. "That's a highly irregular procedure, Mr. Bishop," he said.

"I can't help that, Your Honor," said the man. "I'm in a rather awkward position by force of circumstance. As an elected official who's not allowed to belong to a party, I'm sure you know something about that."

Judge Dellon, who was in fact up for reelection that year and having difficulty living down a Libertarian Party endorsement, permitted himself a small smile. "Touché, Mr. Bishop," he said. "I'll see you in my chambers in a moment, but I can give you no more than five minutes' hearing."

"Thank you, Your Honor," said the man. "That should be plenty."

He strode up the aisle and vanished into the small room behind the bench, and Judge Dellon turned to the Osborns. "If you will excuse me for a moment?" he said.

Mr. Osborn, who was frowning at the door through which the man had disappeared, appeared not to have heard him, so Mrs. Osborn took it upon herself to nod approval. Judge Dellon thanked her, descended from the bench, and entered his chambers, shutting the door behind him.

* * *

"Now, then, Mr. Bishop," he said, settling himself behind his desk, "what's this all about, hey?"

The man folded his hands together, and seemed to be considering. "Tell me, Your Honor," he said, "do you by any chance go in for conjuring tricks?"

This seemed to Judge Dellon a bit of a non sequitur, but he responded easily, "Yes, actually, I was quite fond of them as a young man."

"Good," said Bishop, drawing a long, carved stick of pale wood out from beneath his coat. "That should make it easier for you to recognize that this isn't one."

He made an elaborate series of motions with the stick over a sheaf of notes Judge Dellon had written the day before on a larceny case, and the next moment the Judge started back in alarm. Where the notes had previously been, there now sat a large, rather well-fed porcupine sniffing at his used coffee mug.

Bishop slipped the stick under his arm with a smile. "My credentials," he said, gesturing to the animal.

Slowly, Judge Dellon's brain processed what he had just seen. "So what are you, then?" he said. "A wizard?"

"Well, we prefer the term 'enchanter' at my place of employment," said Bishop.

"Ah," said the Judge faintly. "And where would that be?"

"We call it La Cuela," Bishop said. "But that's neither here nor there. I trust, after what you've just seen –" (here, as if to refresh the Judge's memory, he waved his wand again and the porcupine turned back into a sheaf of larceny notes) "– you'll be willing to accept me as an authority on what we might call News of the Strange and Unusual?"

"I suppose I'll have to," Judge Dellon murmured. "At least, until someone even stranger or more unusual walks into this courthouse."

"In that case, let me be blunt," said Bishop. "The organization that I represent – or, rather, the alliance of organizations – has reason to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Osborn are better suited to the raising of the infant Rowena than anyone else who could have found her. It seems likely to us that you will be doing significant harm to the well-being of a great many people – Rowena not least – if you deprive them of custody of her."

"I see," said the Judge. "May I ask why?"

"You may," said Bishop, "but it won't do you any good, because I don't know. I'm just relaying to you what my employer told me – and she got her information from one of the greatest and most secretive enchanters of our times: a gentleman named Albus Dumbledore." Here he pulled from his pocket, and presented to Judge Dellon, a small card resembling those found in bubble-gum packages, which said that Albus Dumbledore had defeated a dark wizard in 1945, knew twelve different uses for dragons' blood, and enjoyed tenpin bowling.

Judge Dellon examined the card carefully, attempting to ignore the fact that the white-bearded man in the picture on the front was winking at him, and returned it to its owner. "So, then," he said, "I am forced to accept the word of a man of whom I had never heard until ten seconds ago – a word which is coming to me at third hand – in order to safely grant custody of a baby werewolf. I suppose she is a werewolf, by the way?"

"Technically, she's a wifewolf," said Bishop, "but that's a minor detail. Yes, Your Honor, that is precisely what you have to do."

Judge Dellon put his hands to his temples and sighed. The world, he thought, had been so much simpler when he had woken up that morning.

"And," said Bishop, consulting a watch on his right wrist, "since this discussion has now exceeded our agreed-upon five minutes, I will show myself out and leave you to do it. Godspeed, Your Honor." And he turned on his heel and exited the judge's chambers.

Judge Dellon could hear his footsteps echoing on the marble floor of the courtroom, but he paid little attention to them. For some minutes, he sat motionless behind his desk, lost in almost agonizing concentration; then, slowly, like a Martian attempting to stand up on Venus, he rose and went back out to the courtroom.

The Osborns watched him with anxious eyes as he reascended the bench. Rowena, who had woken up during the conference in the judge's chambers, watched him too, and the sight of those wide, emerald-green eyes following his movements as well as a week-old baby's eyes can follow anything was uniquely unsettling to the judge.

"Mr. and Mrs. Osborn," he said slowly, "having carefully considered all the relevant factors, including the... ah... unique testimony of Mr. Bishop, I have at length come to a decision regarding the custody of the infant Rowena."

He paused, and took a deep breath. Neither of the Osborns followed his lead; in fact, they seemed not to be breathing at all.

"Miss Bojesen," said the judge, "if you would present the Osborns with the necessary paperwork..."

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Mrs. Osborn burst into tears, and her husband came within an inch of kissing the young court clerk as she handed him the pile of forms. He whipped out a pen and filled them out with a rapidity never before equalled in the history of Montana law, then thrust them back into Miss Bojesen's hands and led his wife and his now-official daughter out of the courtroom with the stateliness of an Old Testament patriarch.

Judge Dellon sighed, and rubbed his eyes. "Miss Bojesen?" he said.

"Yes, Your Honor?" said his clerk, as she moved over to her desk to file the Osborn adoption papers.

"If we were to postpone the next case for about half an hour," said the judge, "would I still be able to get home in time for dinner?"

Miss Bojesen glanced at the court schedule. "Yes, I should think so," she said. "There's only three more cases scheduled for today, and I don't imagine any of them should run particularly long."

"Good," said Judge Dellon. "Tell the next plaintiff – Goodman's his name, isn't it? – to come back around 2:30. I'm just going to step out for a breath of fresh air."

"And a drink?" said Miss Bojesen with a smile.

"Quite possibly," said Judge Dellon. "If Goodman's case is anything like this one was, I'm going to need very steady nerves for it."


	12. Growth of a Lily in Mountain Soil

Over the course of the next ten years, Remus Lupin left Mrs Collins's tenements and drifted aimlessly throughout Great Britain; Evelyn Linkollew and Thomas Raymond got married and had three children, none of whom had scales or talons; Albus Dumbledore declined the post of Minister of Magic three more times and solidified his reputation as one of the giants of Hogwarts history; John Patrick Dellon served two more terms as district judge for Flatwillow before retiring to spend more time with his wife and youngest daughter; and Rowena Margaret Osborn, _née_ Clay, grew from a diminutive infant into a healthy and spirited young woman.

Due to the slight malnutrition in early life that is inevitable in External Womb babies (an umbilical cord simulated by charms is a poor substitute for the real thing), she remained perpetually small for her age, and her head always gave the impression of being slightly too big for her body. She inherited, however, the robust constitution of both her biological parents, and the active lifestyle of a farmer's daughter (her father had her assisting in the less demanding chores almost as soon as she was old enough to walk) ironed out any lingering frailties that the circumstances of her proto-infancy might have left in her frame.

In appearance, it might have been said that she was her mother down to the nose, and her father below it. That is, she had the dark-red hair, the small, pert nose, and (of course) the almond-shaped, startlingly green eyes of Lily Evans, combined with the thin, sly mouth and the round, determined chin of James Potter. The juxtaposition could not be called strictly beautiful, but it had a certain roguish charm that her foster parents, and particularly her father, delighted in.

Nor was her appearance the only roguish thing about her. Whereas her unknown brother, a hemisphere away in Little Whinging, had the appearance of his father and the affections of his mother, Rowena combined the general contours of an Evans with the incorrigible temperament of a Marauder. The 15,000-acre expanse of the Flaming O Ranch offered her innumerable opportunities for mischief, and she took nearly all of them; she snitched her mother's wedding ring and hid it in the cow pasture, dug in the fields for groundhogs and then let them loose in the ranch house, and nearly got trampled by the stallion Xerxes when she was fooling with the padlock on his pen and inadvertently let him out.

Indeed, if it hadn't been for her father's intervention, Rowena would likely have gotten herself arrested before she was old enough to vote. (And probably gotten a stiff sentence, too, for Judge Dellon's successor, the Honorable Hector C. Graney, was a staunch conservative with a deep-seated distaste for female delinquents and no love lost for the Flaming O set.) Where Mrs. Osborn was inclined, in an understandable excess of natural affection, to pamper and spoil the daughter she had desired so long, Mr. Osborn was determined that the future mistress of his ancestral lands should grow up to be a disciplined and responsible woman, and he exerted all the powers of his formidable personality to this end. Indeed, part of the reason he so delighted in Rowena's willfulness was because it matched his own; his tussles with her were like duels between two swordsmen of the same school.

There was one area, however, concerning which no struggles between father and daughter were necessary: namely, Rowena's monthly transformations. From the age of four, when she had woken up with dried blood and feathers on her lips and a search of the chicken coop had revealed that her beloved hen Cynthia was missing, Rowena had understood perfectly that the wolf inside her needed to be kept firmly under control, and she had given her total cooperation to her parents' methods of doing so. Every month at the full moon, when Jeff DePinto drove her out to the exact middle of the Osborn land (using his old, fume-belching pickup so as to muffle any human scent that might be left), she sat demurely on the grass until the moon rose, neither attempting to follow the truck back as it drove off nor moping about the unfairness of not being able to sleep in her bed every night – and Albus Dumbledore, when informed of this many years later, commented that the good spirit with which she had entered into her transformations had likely made Petroleum County much safer than it might otherwise have been.

* * *

It had never occurred to either of her parents to conceal from Rowena the mystery surrounding her birth; in fact, the basket in which she was found and the strange parchment note were among the most discussed objects in the Osborn house. The theory that R.L. was her mother and A.D. a family friend, offered so tentatively by Mrs. Osborn that first evening, had become accepted as gospel by Rowena's first "finding-day" (celebrated on May 30 in lieu of a birthday), and an entire family mythology had grown up around it.

R.L. and her husband, it was asserted, were Chicago residents who had both shared their daughter's lycanthropic affliction, and had found themselves, shortly after Rowena's conception, slowly sinking into a sort of bestial mindlessness brought on by some atypical lunar phenomenon. By the time Rowena was born, they had all but gone feral, and R.L., in one last burst of sanity, had entrusted her daughter to A.D. (who was usually a Catholic priest, to satisfy Mr. Osborn's vague, Episcopalian notions of Catholic priests as wise, mysterious figures acquainted with all the secrets of the occult) to prevent herself from tearing her apart with her own teeth. The Osborns were unclear why A.D. had left Rowena in the O'Hare terminal, but the usual consensus was that he, being only a humble parish priest, was unequipped to raise a baby werewolf, and had trusted on faith that whoever came along after him would be able to do better. (This was never fully satisfactory, but, since the Osborns were unaware of the marvelous properties of Felix Felicis, they were unable to come up with a better explanation.)

It will be seen that this version of the story left Rowena without the adopted child's usual recourse, when in dispute with her parents, of shouting, "You're not my real father!" since Mr. Osborn could respond easily, "No, and you'd better be grateful. If I was your real father, you'd be dead now." It also, however, provided her with another and a rather more elegant way of expressing her dudgeon with her caregivers: to wit, by insisting that her last name was Larson, or Langford, or Lobachevsky, or whatever L name happened to catch her fancy on that particular day. (The Flaming O Ranch, unknown to its owner, lost quite a bit of money one day when a potential customer called to ask about their beef-preparation processes, and eight-year-old Rowena, fresh from an altercation with her father about the judiciousness of leaving garter snakes in her mother's underwear drawer, had answered the phone with, "Hello, this is Rowena Lillie speaking, how may I help you?")

Even this, however, she didn't do very often, as she was actually quite fond of her parents. For her father, this was merely the usual affection that children feel for their parents of the opposite sex, but with her mother, it was a different story. Rowena seemed to have an almost puppy-like attachment to Mrs. Osborn: every time something significant happened to her, whether it was the exaltation of landing a part in the school play or the shivering terrors that followed particularly rough full-moon transformations, she would fly instantly to her mother's arms, driven by an almost physical longing for affirmation and comfort.

This attachment was matched, as has been noted, by Mrs. Osborn's equally strong attachment to Rowena, and so the two of them became something of a local icon: the Flatwillow Madonna and Child, as it were. The townswomen would see the two of them going into the local Rite-Aid, their arms around each other's waists, and they would sigh wistfully and wish that they and their daughters had such a simple, natural, mutually pleasing relationship as did Julie and Rowena Osborn.

So the hidden Potter child "grew, and waxed strong in spirit" (though not, perhaps, as strong as the child of whom those words were first written), and never imagined that there was anything unusual about her apart from her monthly difficulties – and then, one day, came a flier that changed everything.


	13. We Want You as a New Recruit

It was a hot, lazy afternoon in July of 1992. Mr. and Mrs. Osborn had gone to a matinee performance of _Aladdin_; one might have expected them to take their ten-year-old daughter with them, but Rowena had an aversion to Disney movies ever since _Beauty and the Beast _had hit a little too close to home, so she was alone in the ranch house. (The Osborns were less concerned about leaving their daughter home alone than most parents of children that age, partially because the harshness of the Montana prairie makes independent and self-reliant women out of even its youngest daughters, but mostly because the DePintos were just a hundred yards away anyway.)

This was the sort of occasion Rowena most enjoyed. There was something about the long corridors, the numerous obscure, out-of-the-way rooms, and the almost visible historicity of the Flaming O ranch house that appealed irresistibly to the explorer in her; to be allowed to wander about in it unimpeded by even the awareness of other human presences was as near to perfect happiness as she ever expected to get this side of heaven. She was capable of spending nearly an entire afternoon just poking around the attic.

It was, in fact, while she was curled up in an attic corner, surrounded by an old collection of _St. Nicholas_ magazines that had once belonged to her grandmother, that she heard the front door open. She froze, remembering that her parents weren't supposed to be home for at least another hour, but relaxed again when she heard Frederick DePinto's voice from the kitchen.

"Rowena?" the eighteen-year-old apprentice farmhand called. "If you can hear this, I just thought I'd bring your mail in."

Rowena slapped herself on the forehead. One of her usual responsibilities was to get the mail when it came around noon; as a general rule, she was quite good about it, but the excitement of being able to roam around the ranch house unmolested had driven it completely out of her mind. She knew she ought to shout a thank-you back down to Frederick for doing her job for her, but a childish urge not to let him know where in the house she was restrained her and, anyway, there was something almost sacrilegious about shouting in so still and peaceful an attic.

As soon as she heard him leave, however, she yielded to the instinct of every child when the mail arrives, and, carefully marking her place in the Peterkins story she was reading, rose to her feet and tiptoed back down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she scooped the pile of mail off the counter and began paging through it to see if any of the envelopes were addressed to her.

It was, as usual, a vain hope. The mail that day consisted of three items: a letter to Mrs. Osborn from her sister Kristin, a Montana Democratic Party flier for Mr. Osborn promising a new golden age of peace and justice if Bill Clinton was elected in November, and a brochure of some kind that had evidently gone to the wrong house, as it was addressed to a Miss R. Clay. Rowena dropped this latter item in the waste-paper basket, put the other two at the appropriate places on the dining-room table, and was just going back upstairs to see what would happen to Agamemnon and Elizabeth Eliza when she heard a strange _ffft_ sound, and she turned around to see the brochure she had just thrown away sitting on the floor at her feet.

At first, she didn't think much of it. Assuming it had simply fallen out of the wastebasket, she replaced it a bit more firmly and turned to leave again. She had scarcely taken three steps, however, when – _ffft_.

She froze, and turned around slowly. Sure enough, there was the brochure lying on the floor – this time at a distance from the wastebasket that could not be explained as the simple result of gravity. An involuntary shiver ran down Rowena's spine, and for the first time that day she wished that her mother were somewhere in the house with her.

Slowly, she tiptoed toward the brochure, picked it up gingerly, and dropped it gently into the waste-paper basket. This time, she didn't turn around, but stayed rooted to the floor, with her eyes fixed on the blue-and-silver brochure – and she leaped back with a yelp when it shot itself out of the basket, rose straight into the air until it was nearly a foot above her head, and then gracefully fluttered back down to the ground, landing neatly right in front of her feet.

Rowena swallowed. "Okay, fine," she said aloud. "I guess I'll open it, if it's that important to you." She wasn't quite sure whom she was talking to, but it seemed to her that anyone who could make a brochure do what she'd just seen was quite capable of overhearing what she said.

She reached out with a trembling hand, picked up the brochure, and examined it. There was no return address – unless you counted the picture in the corner, which showed a large, stylized cricket surrounded by an elaborate arrangement of stars – but the mailing address was perfectly clear, and, apart from the erroneous last name, perfectly accurate as well. Frowning, she turned it over and read the note on the cover.

_Dear Miss Clay,_ it read:_ Almost everyone, at one time or another, has felt uncomfortably different from his or her fellows. In most cases, this difference is simply one of interests, temperament, or beliefs, but every once in a while someone comes along who is genuinely on a different level from other human beings – who has a more perfect awareness of the hidden and unknowable aspects of the universe, and can more perfectly manipulate them for good or ill. It is the mission of Cricketshorn University of Enchantment and the Liberal Arts to locate such people, to strengthen in them their unique gifts, and to train them, by an immersion in the moral heritage of our common ancestors, to use those gifts for their own good and that of mankind._

_In plain words, this means that we believe you to have been born with the gift of magic, and that we would like to invite you to come and study the magical arts at the most illustrious school of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. A description of our institution appears on the inside pages of this brochure; if you find yourself interested, turn to the last page and follow the instructions printed there._

_On behalf of the worldwide community of enchanters, we urge you to consider this offer very carefully. An untrained enchantress is a very dangerous thing, both to herself and to others; an enchantress who has mastered her craft, and uses it in the service of good, is one of the glories of humanity. Choose wisely._

This was signed with an indecipherable scrawl and the printed words _Alexandra Spithaler, Headmistress_.

* * *

Rowena reread this message two or three times, as though expecting it to say something different from what it had said the first time. _There must be some mistake,_ she thought. _I'm a werewolf, not an enchantress. I've never had a more perfect awareness of the hidden whatever-it-is, or anything like that. They must be thinking of someone else._

Deep down, however, she didn't really believe this. The deep-seated prejudice (common to many non-magical persons) that great wizards never make mistakes prevented her from believing that the Headmistress of the most illustrious school of magic in the Western Hemisphere could have inserted a wrong number into a street address. (Interestingly, it did not prevent her from believing that that same Headmistress could write to someone named Osborn and address her as Miss Clay. It seemed vaguely possible to her that students at Cricketshorn were assigned new names when they began their studies; perhaps they were each consecrated to one of the four elements, and the name Clay indicated that she had already been singled out as a Dedicate of Earth.)

Dazedly, she flipped through the brochure's pages, and glanced at short columns of print extolling "the world-famous Sky Hall" and "the polyphonic splendor of En Chanter" without taking in a word of it. _Choose wisely, _the Headmistress had said, but Rowena knew herself better than that. Cleverness, mother-wit, antic imagination: all those things she had in abundance, but of wisdom she was all but devoid. When confronted with a life-or-death decision (or a decision that seemed life-or-death to a ten-year-old, such as where to hold her finding-day party), she invariably submitted it to the judgment of leveler heads than hers and this was no time to start changing her methods.

She went into the living room, picked up the telephone, and dialed a cell-phone number that she knew by heart. She waited in silence as the phone on the other end vibrated, and then after about thirty seconds she heard Mrs. Osborn's voice say, "Rowena, is this you?"

"Yeah, hi, Mom," said Rowena. "Is the movie almost over?"

"Probably," said Mrs. Osborn. "Unless the battle with the villain isn't the climax, which would be an odd way of making a movie. Why?"

"Okay, good," said Rowena. "When it gets done, could you try to hurry home? There's something I kind of need to talk to you about."


	14. Will You, Won't You?

"Enchantment and the liberal arts," said Mrs. Osborn, in a tone that suggested that she was groping for something to say that wouldn't end in hysteria. "Now, there's two phrases that I never thought I'd use in the same sentence."

Her husband was busy scrutinizing a picture on page 5 of the brochure. "Where do I know this guy from?" he said. "I know I've seen that face somewhere before."

Rowena leaned over his shoulder and glanced at the white-robed figure he was pointing to. "'Professor Roderick Kreuter, Defense against the Dark Arts Master and Head of Crux House,'" she read from the caption. "I dunno. I've never heard you guys talk about anyone named Kreuter."

Mr. Osborn shook his head. "I don't know the name," he said. "Just the face. It was a long time ago, I think, back when you were still a baby."

"Could he have been at the airport when you found me?" Rowena suggested. "If he teaches Defense against the Dark Arts, maybe he knew I was a werewolf and wanted to keep an eye on me."

"Maybe," said Mr. Osborn dubiously. "That would explain how this school knew where to find you."

"Yes," said Mrs. Osborn, running her hand across her forehead, "but it still doesn't tell us what it wants with her."

"Well, that part was pretty obvious, wasn't it?" said Mr. Osborn, flipping back to the cover of the brochure. "They want her to... how does it go... 'to study the magical arts at the most illustrious school of its kind in the Western Hemisphere'."

"But why?" said Rowena. "I mean, if I could do magic, wouldn't I have noticed? Wouldn't I have, you know, cast little baby spells when I was upset or something?"

"Maybe you did," said Mr. Osborn. "I always wondered why you weren't trampled to death when you let Xerxes out of his stall that one time."

Rowena got a sudden flash of herself at six years old, huddling on the floor of the barn as the hooves of a crazed Appaloosa stallion came again and again within an inch of her body, but were somehow prevented from ever landing. "Okay, maybe," she said. "But, still, how... I mean, how can I go away to a school to learn that?"

"In the usual way, I suppose," said Mr. Osborn. "They give you a wand and a pointy hat, they teach you a bunch of secret words to say, and by your first summer vacation you're turning all our silverware into garter snakes as a homework assignment."

Rowena shook her head. "No, that's not what I mean," she said. "I mean, how can I... _go_ to learn that?"

The instant she said it, she wished she hadn't. It seemed to her as though she had laid her soul bare with those few words: that she had betrayed an aspect of herself that she would have given anything to keep secret. It is perhaps somewhat paradoxical, therefore, that she was highly annoyed when Mr. Osborn's expression made it clear that he had no idea what she was talking about.

She cast a despairing look at her mother, and was relieved to see that she, at least, had understood what she had been trying to say. "I think what Rowena means," she said softly, "is that this school appears to be a boarding school, and she doesn't want to have to leave home to study magic."

Mr. Osborn blinked. "Is that the problem?" he said.

The look on his daughter's face made it plain that it was.

"Good heavens, girl," he said, "your great-grandfather trekked halfway across the Great Plains when he was only a year older than you are. Surely you can handle a few months at a school that's probably not more than a few hundred miles away."

There was some justice in this statement. The only reference that the brochure made to the specific location of Cricketshorn was a brief statement that it was "nestled in the heart of the Rocky Mountains", which, since the village of Flatwillow was only about an hour's drive from the Montana section of that majestic range, made Mr. Osborn's postulated distance between the two quite plausible. This, however, was small consolation for Rowena.

"I know it's stupid," she said, "but I... I don't... I mean, I can't... I..."

It was infuriating. She knew perfectly well what she wanted to say: that however nearby the school was, it was still an unfamiliar building filled with strangers, and to expect her to go and live there – she who couldn't even go to sleep in a hotel bedroom unless she had her stuffed collie Laura with her – was asking too much of human courage. But she couldn't get it out, and at last she took the path of least resistance, which consisted of collapsing into her mother's lap and bursting into tears.

Mrs. Osborn ran a hand through her daughter's hair and glared at her husband. "Honestly, Nat," she said, "why do you always have to handle things this way? So your grandfather was a worthy member of the Westward Ho generation. So what? Rowena's not your grandfather."

"Maybe not," said Mr. Osborn, his tone gentler but still stern, "but she's the only heir to his legacy, and that's something I expect her to live up to. It's not that I'm not proud of you already, Meg," he said to Rowena (she smiled at the familiar nickname). "You're a wonderful girl, and very mature for a ten-year-old – but you've still got a lot of growing up to do, and this Cricketshorn looks like as good a place as any for you to do it."

Rowena swallowed. "So you think I should go, then?" she said.

Mr. Osborn shrugged. "Well, if they're right about you having this power, then I don't know that you have much of a choice," he said. "They said that an untrained enchantress was a dangerous thing, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Anyone with the power to call down hailstorms and sicken cattle has a responsibility to learn how to control it, seems to me."

"That's all very well, Nat," said Mrs. Osborn, "but going to a boarding school might very well be as dangerous for Rowena as remaining untrained. Or have you forgotten why we never let her join the Girl Scouts?"

Mr. Osborn frowned. "Full-moon issues, you mean?"

His wife nodded.

"Yeah, that could be a problem," Mr. Osborn acknowledged. "Still, I have to believe that the Cricketshorn people are prepared for that. If they know all this other stuff about Rowena..."

"What other stuff?" said Mrs. Osborn. "All they know is her address, her name – which they got wrong – and that she can do magic – which we didn't even know ourselves. For all we know, they found her name by muttering a spell over the Rankin Elementary student records and don't know about her monthly problems any more than Principal Heintzberger does."

Mr. Osborn sighed. "The truth of the matter is, we just don't have enough information," he said. "Three hours ago, none of us had even knew this school existed; there's no way we can make an informed decision about whether or not to send Rowena there based on a single brochure."

"Agreed," said Mrs. Osborn. "So what do you suggest we do?"

"Talk to someone who's been there," said Mr. Osborn. "Did you notice that they gave an address in Helena where Rowena could go to buy school supplies? We could drive out there and pay them a visit sometime before the end of the month: turn the ranch over to Jeff, book a hotel, spend the afternoon in the city, and come back the next day."

He was well aware of the attractions this proposal would present for his wife. Mrs. Osborn, the reader will recall, had been raised in Savannah, Georgia, and she had never quite adapted to country life. When her husband voluntarily offered to take them to one of the few significant cities in the Big Sky State, it was not an offer that she lightly refused.

"Maybe," she said. "What do you think, Rowena?"

"Hmm?" said Rowena, who had been preoccupied with wondering whether schools of enchantment served roasted newts in their cafeterias. "I'm sorry, what was that?"

"How would you like to drive out to Helena for a day and investigate this school before we sign you up for it?" said Mr. Osborn.

Rowena considered. She had been to Helena once, on a school trip to the state capitol, and the principal thing she remembered about it was the place that her teacher had taken them for lunch.

"Can we go to Chuck E. Cheese's?" she asked.

Mr. Osborn grinned. "Sure."

"Okay, then."

"Excellent," said Mr. Osborn, rising from his chair. "I'll go call the Hilton and see what's available."


	15. Helena and Mr Herbaly

"What did they say the place was called again?" said Mr. Osborn, squinting out the Oldsmobile windshield as the establishments on Helena's Main Street slipped by.

"Let's see," said Mrs. Osborn, consulting the brochure. "Herbaly's Harmonies, 607 Last Chance Gulch, Helena, MT 59601." She sighed. "Honestly, if anyone had told me as a girl that I would someday be living in a state where the main street of the capital city was called Last Chance Gulch, I'd have said he was crazy."

"Yes, I know, Julie," said Mr. Osborn, with the indulgent tone of a man who has had this discussion several hundred times before. "We Montanans are a savage and barbaric tribe, and true civilization can only be found west of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Please forgive this wretched person for daring to... good God, is _that_ the place?"

Rowena and Mrs. Osborn both turned to follow the Flaming O patriarch's gaze, and both received a shock similar to that which he had expressed.

"That's where I'm supposed to buy stuff to go to a magic school?" said Rowena.

Mrs. Osborn frowned. "Looks like it," she said. "It has the right name, and it's in the right place."

"But... but..." Rowena's objection was so obvious to her that it took her a moment to get it out. "But it's a _music store_!"

There was a good deal of justice in this assertion. Herbaly's Harmonies, seen from the outside, was indeed indistinguishable from an ordinary supplier of musical books and instruments – and, judging by what the Osborns could make out through the propped-open door, it was equally quotidian when viewed from the inside.

"Yes," said Mrs. Osborn slowly. "It's a music store."

"Well, how the heck am I supposed to buy magic supplies at a music store?" demanded Rowena.

"Well, the two fields are slightly related," Mr. Osborn reflected. The immediate shock had worn off, and his natural faculty for judicious appraisal was reasserting itself. "There was the Pied Piper, for instance – and that Welsh wizard who played the harp, what was his name..."

Mrs. Osborn laughed. "Well, if Rowena has to be musical in order to be magical, then she's in big trouble," she said. "I trust we all remember what a disaster her piano lessons were?"

Rowena groaned. "Oh, yeah."

The three of them reflected for a moment, and a silence fell inside the car. This silence, however, lasted only a few seconds before being broken by the blare of a pickup horn. It seemed that Mr. Osborn, in his abstraction, had stopped the car in the middle of the street a fact that did not amuse the driver behind him, who was impatient to get to the hospital where his wife was at that moment giving birth.

"All right, all right, keep your shirt on!" Mr. Osborn called to him. Deftly, he pulled the Oldsmobile up to the side of the curb, and, as the red Chevrolet zoomed past, turned to his womenfolk with an inquiring expression. "Well?" he said. "Shall we give the place a shot?"

Rowena glanced at her mother, who shrugged. "What could it hurt?" she said.

"That's the spirit," said Mr. Osborn.

The three of them unlatched their seatbelts and climbed out of the car. Mr. Osborn and Rowena each took one of Mrs. Osborn's hands, and together they entered Herbaly's Harmonies.

* * *

A slight shiver of excitement went through Rowena as she stepped inside the old music store. Partially, this was because the feeling of age that so enticed her about her own home was even stronger inside Herbaly's Harmonies; it would not have surprised Rowena to learn that this store had been standing since Montana had been declared a state. But, also, there was something about the very fact of its being a music store that enchanted her – for though she lacked the necessary patience to master a musical instrument herself, she had always been fascinated by the world of music in general. (Her fourth-grade class's field trip to the local opera house's performance of _Peter and the Wolf_, which had put most of her classmates to sleep, had been for her one of the most satisfying experiences she could remember; indeed, she was one of the few people in history to be satisfied by the ending of _Peter and the Wolf_. The hunters' failure to kill the wolf, which is usually something of a letdown, came to her as a great relief.)

Surreptitiously, she reached out to a kettledrum that made up part of the window display and tapped her index fingernail against the sheepskin. A low, vibrating rumble resounded through the tiny shop, and her mother turned and gave her a stern look. "Now, Rowena, what have I told you about window shopping?" she said.

Rowena sighed. "If you can't pay for it, don't mess with it," she recited.

"All right, then," said Mrs. Osborn. "Until we find what we came here for, keep your hands to yourself and don't go getting into trouble."

"Oh, she's no trouble," said a deep, cheery voice. The Osborns turned, and saw a round little man of about sixty-five standing behind the counter.

"Nearly every child who comes in here wants to improvise on some piece of merchandise or other," he said. "I've never had to send one back to the factory in thirty-six years."

"Well, that's because you've never had Rowena come in here," said Mr. Osborn with a grin. "She's a darling girl, but her talent for creating mayhem is unrivalled."

The man laughed. "I had one like that myself," he said. "The fancier the hotel, the more certain she was to set off the fire alarm in the middle of the night. And the ironic thing is, she's working for the Forest Service now."

"You'd be Mr. Herbaly, I suppose?" said Mrs. Osborn. (She said this not because she had any doubt, but because she thought it judicious to change the subject quickly. She didn't know Mr. Herbaly's political views, and she wanted to deflect her husband before he made some comment about how an incendiary in the Forest Service was probably just what Manuel Lujan wanted.)

"Trevor Herbaly, that's me," said the man. "What can I do you for?"

The Osborns glanced at each other, and Mrs. Osborn took a deep breath. "We were told," she said, "that you could supply our daughter with the materials she needed for the school she's considering going to next fall."

Mr. Herbaly arched an eyebrow. "Cricketshorn, eh?" he said.

Mrs. Osborn blinked. "Is that how you pronounce it?" she said. "Cricket's-Horn?"

"Sure," said Mr. Herbaly. "How else would you pronounce it?"

Mrs. Osborn flushed. "Well, we've been reading 'Cricket-Shorn' for the last twenty-four hours," she said. "We weren't quite sure why anyone would shear a cricket, but that was what it looked like."

Mr. Herbaly shook his head. "No, no," he said. "Cricket's-Horn is what it is. It's a take-off on the great English school, Hogwarts."

Mrs. Osborn blinked. "_Hog-warts_?" she repeated.

"That's right," said Mr. Herbaly with a grin. "It's the most famous school of enchantment in the English-speaking world, so, when John Rawlins went to found his own school for young magic-makers on this side of the Atlantic, he decided that it had to be named after some part of an animal's body, too." He shrugged. "Well, I suppose 'Oxford' doesn't sound much more like a center of learning, when you think about it."

"I see," said Mrs. Osborn. "Well, could we see the school supplies for Cricket's-Horn or Cricket-Shorn or whatever it's called?"

"Oh, of course," said Mr. Herbaly, and gave the bell on the counter a ring. "Ben!" he hollered in the general direction of the storage-room door. "Take over the counter for a bit, will you? I've got to take some customers downstairs."

* * *

This turned out to be easier said than done. The door to the basement, located in the far back of the store, was the most decrepit excuse for a portal that any of the Osborns had ever seen, and it took Mr. Herbaly a good fifteen minutes' worth of fiddling with an equally decrepit key before it even seemed amenable to the idea of coming loose.

"I don't use the thing very often," he said apologetically. "There just aren't enough people in this state who get Cricketshorn brochures. I'm sure if you visited Hruby's place in Sacramento, his door opens as smooth as butter, but..."

"Oh, so there's a different store in every state that does this?" said Mrs. Osborn.

"Sure," said Mr. Herbaly. "Didn't they tell you about that in the brochure?"

Mrs. Osborn shook her head.

"Huh," said Mr. Herbaly. "Well, never mind, you'll see for yourself soon enough. Ah, there it goes." The door had finally consented to loosen its grip on its molding, and he shoved it open with his foot.

As he did so, a blast of hot air emerged from the basement that nearly knocked Rowena over. It was not an unusually cool day, as summertime in Montana goes, but, compared to what was behind that door, the rest of the store might as well have been in Alaska.

Puzzled, she followed Mr. Herbaly and her mother down the basement steps, with Osborn _père _bringing up the rear. It was an awfully long staircase for a music-store basement; Rowena counted twenty-three steps before the end of the stairwell was in sight, and another twelve before her feet made contact with the basement floor.

She glanced around, expecting to see shelves full of crystal balls, rune-covered staffs, dried salamanders hanging from strings, and suchlike gewgaws. What she saw instead baffled her.

"Hang on," she said. "This is just more musical stuff."

"Not _just_ more musical stuff, my dear girl," Mr. Herbaly corrected her. "You are standing on the ground floor of Cricketshorn University's principal and only supplier of all things pertaining to the noblest of arts."

Mrs. Osborn stared at him. "Why does a school of magic need musical supplies?" she said.

"Because they have a music department," said Mr. Herbaly patiently. "Or did you think that the 'Liberal Arts' part of their name was just for decoration?"

Mrs. Osborn frowned. "I hadn't really thought about it, to tell you the truth."

"Mm," said Mr. Herbaly. "Well, in any case, yes, they have a music department, and the students who take those courses need instruments, texts, and so forth. They also have a world-class choir, and _it_ needs texts, training materials, and so forth. And, yes, there are certain high-level Charms courses that require a solid knowledge of some musical instrument – Taliesin and all that stuff, you know."

Mr. Osborn slapped his thigh. "Taliesin," he said. "That was the fellow's name."

"You're right, though," said Mr. Herbaly, "in thinking that we're not one of the major suppliers to La Cuela. That's the other reason I don't get down here much; apart from when Brendan Kilpatrick loses his favorite tuning fork or something, there's not generally much call for my services."

"Wait a minute, though," said Mrs. Osborn. "If all you sell is music books and instruments, where is Rowena supposed to get her wand and her spell books and so forth?"

"At some of the other stores," said Mr. Herbaly. "Didn't I tell you there was a Cricketshorn supplier in every state?"

Mrs. Osborn stared at him. "Mr. Herbaly," she said, in the tone that she assumed when she was trying to be very patient with mule-headed idiots, "my husband and I own a ranch in Petroleum County. We have three thousand head of cattle that need fairly constant attention. We have no intention of gallivanting all over the country just so we can buy our daughter school supplies."

"Never said you should," said Mr. Herbaly, and Rowena got the impression he was trying very hard not to smile. "Just step out the door there."

He pointed to a door at the far end of the room – a large, red door exactly like the one they had come into the store through, though what it was doing in the basement was not immediately clear. Rowena suddenly realized what an unusual basement this was; not only did it have a front door, but there were also a number of windows lining the walls. What was more, through each of these windows was pouring almost blinding sunlight, even though the sky in Helena that day was actually mildly overcast.

Hesitantly, she went over to the nearest window and snuck a peek through the shutters. Her eyes widened. "Um, Mom, Dad?" she said. "You might want to come see this."

Mr. and Mrs. Osborn came up behind her and took their own looks out the window – and their eyes, too, widened, for the scene that they were viewing through the basement window of a Helena music shop was a scene straight out of a Pacific island romance. Sapphire-blue waves lapped against a white-sandy beach, palm trees swayed in the wind, and, if Mr. Osborn (the tallest of the three) craned his neck just right, he could just make out the silhouette of a young man who was quite unmistakably drinking from a coconut.

Mrs. Osborn whirled to face the now-broadly-smiling Mr. Herbaly. "What is going on here?" she demanded.

"Magic," said Mr. Herbaly equably. "Fifty states, fifty stores. On the surface, each of them is just another small family business somewhere in the state capital – but go down to the basement, and you're no longer in the state capital. You're on a tiny island somewhere in the South Pacific that Cricketshorn bought off the Interior Department in 1919 for the express purpose of giving its students someplace to go to buy school supplies."

"Are we still in the basement, though?" said Rowena. "I don't see how this can be a basement, if you can look out the window and see the sky."

"Well, it's a basement from inside," said Mr. Herbaly, "but from outside it's its own building." Three pairs of eyes stared blankly at him, and he shrugged. "Don't ask me how it works. I just inherited the business."

Mrs. Osborn took a deep breath. "Okay," she said. "So we drove out to Helena so we could go shopping on a Pacific island. Does this island have a name, by the way?"

"Well, not on the maps," said Mr. Herbaly, "but those of us who do business here generally call it Polif. And so," he added, walking over to the door and flinging it open with a grand gesture, "let me be the first to welcome you good people to the Polif Bazaar."


	16. Polif Isle

Rowena and her parents stepped out onto the tropical sands and looked around in awe. The first sight of the Polif Bazaar rarely fails to impress, even when the seer has known of its existence all his life: for the Osborns, to whom the buying of school supplies had hitherto meant dinky little shops full of compasses and straightedges, it was a Chapman's-Homer moment.

How to describe the Polif Bazaar? In some respects, one might call it an amalgam of all the world's great avenues of commerce. Like the Flower District in New York City, it consists of a great many specialized stores all centering around a single theme; like the Khyber Pass, it is filled (at least in the summer months) with merchants calling out to passers-by, inviting them to sample their wares; like the Ginsu district of Tokyo, it is, due to the haphazard way in which it was originally laid out, all but impossible for a newcomer to navigate who wishes to find something specific.

And, like Diagon Alley in London, it exists for the sole purpose of providing the would-be enchanter with everything he needs to properly assert his mastery over the forces of nature. (This is not always immediately obvious, since relatively few of the numerous customers who traverse the Isle are dressed in the traditional garb of an enchanter, but anyone who believed that it was instituted for another purpose would be relieved of that illusion as soon as he came across Charles Feferman and Sons, Purveyors of Potion Materials to Cricketshorn University since 1952.)

There was, however, one element of the Bazaar that was unique to it: namely, the fifty-state theme. Originally, as Mr. Herbaly had suggested, this had simply been a way of accommodating students who would have found it arduous to drive halfway across a continent just to purchase note-paper, but none of the Polif merchants had had any intention of leaving it at that. Each store on the Isle was festooned with symbols of its home state: its flag flew on the rooftop, its motto was graven on the front lintel, its state flower was draped in garlands over every available window (except in the case of the Kentucky store, which's proprietor happened to be allergic to goldenrod), and any other symbol of state pride that the owner could think of had a place of honor on the store doorstep. (Though few owners could match the ingenuity of Melvin Barton, proprietor of the Oklahoma outlet: he had placed replicas of the two Oklahomans in the National Statuary Hall on his doorstep and enchanted them to life, so that Will Rogers actually cracked jokes with the customers while Sequoyah offered to write them their names in his alphabet.)

Taken together, these elements make for a rather stunning spectacle, and the three Osborns were appropriately stunned. For several minutes, they just wandered through the narrow, wandering alleys that lay between the shops, staring wide-eyed at the fabulous diversity of materials that apparently went into a standard year at Cricketshorn. ("Who knew wizards rode bicycles?" Rowena commented at one point, referring to a nearby store festooned with black-eyed Susans.)

Eventually, though, they turned one particular corner and found themselves standing in front of a relatively inconspicuous building whise lintel read, **Local Cricketshorn Office, Isle of Polif: Registration Forms, Course Schedules, and Other Resources for the First-Year Student. **The sight of it reminded the Osborns forcefully of the central question they had gone to Helena to decide: was Rowena to become a first-year Cricketshorn student, or to remain a loyal alumna of Rankin Elementary in Flatwillow?

Mrs. Osborn turned to her daughter with a gentle smile. "Well, Meg?" she said. "Shall we go in?"

Rowena sighed. "I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?" said Mr. Osborn. "Did you see they had an armory back there? How can you not want to go to a school that actually sells its students guns?"

Mrs. Osborn glared at him. "You are not being helpful, Nat," she said. "And anyway, I doubt that store would sell Rowena anything more dangerous than a knife for cutting magic herbs."

"Or a sword," Rowena suggested. "If they have music classes, they could have fencing classes, too."

"Well, there you go, then," said Mr. Osborn. "Don't you want to learn how to fence?"

Rowena gave him a weird look. "I'm only four foot five," she said.

"All the more reason you should learn," said Mr. Osborn. "Nothing commands respect like a four-foot-five girl who can whip out a sword and slice off your eyebrows at the slightest provocation."

"Where would I whip it out from?" said Rowena. "If I hung it from my waist, it would be longer than my legs."

"You could carry it on your back," Mr. Osborn suggested. "Then you'd get the added respect that people give to sword-thieves."

Mrs. Osborn sighed. "All right, that's it," she said. "I don't know about you two, but I'm going inside. I don't consider myself a particularly poor specimen, but I am fifty-four years old, and, after what Dr. Ruark told me last month, I don't really think I ought to be standing in the middle of a desert island, with the sub-tropical sun beating down on me, while my daughter decides whether she wants to go learn to be a sword-thief."

Mr. Osborn and Rowena were suitably chastened, and both agreed to go in with her. The three of them entered the teal-and-yellow building, and were glad of it almost at once; unlike Mr. Herbaly's basement, the Polif Cricketshorn Office was air-conditioned, and the cool, clear air inside came as a great relief after the sweltering humidity of the South Seas.

Mrs. Osborn sat down on one of the row of chairs along the east wall, and Rowena stared around at the office furnishings. There were not, in truth, a great many of them (the proprietor being, like most persons who make paperwork their lives' vocations, rather an unflamboyant sort), but there were a number of photographs adorning the walls, and it was these that caught Rowena's fancy.

They were, presumably, photographs of Cricketshorn students, although, apart from the white robes the figures were wearing, they could have been photographs of students at any seven-year boarding school. In one of them, three girls were dousing a fire they had started during a lab experiment; in another, two young Oriental men were comparing study notes, while a third showed a track runner surprised in the middle of training. All of them, however, had one thing in common: the people in them were in a place where they felt at home, surrounded by others who shared with them the strange blessing that divided them from the outside world.

To Rowena, there was something wonderful about this. Despite a reasonably successful career in public school, the story of her childhood was almost exclusively one of isolation; Mr. and Mrs. Osborn, concerned for both Rowena's safety and that of the other children in Flatwillow, had strongly discouraged her from forming any close friendships. To be sure, she had been more than compensated by the affection that both the Osborns and the DePintos had lavished on her from her first hour – but, all the same, there had always been something missing, and the pictures in front of her nicely encapsulated that something.

Envy was not one of Rowena's vices, and she did not begrudge the figures in the pictures their happiness. On the contrary, they enchanted her, and she was leaning in to get a better view of a drama-group cast shot when she heard a light laugh from behind her. "So, my dear," said a voice, "you like my little display, do you?"

Rowena jumped, whirled around, and found herself staring into the merry, green eyes of a tall, dark-haired woman in her late thirties. "Um, yes," she said, flushing slightly. "Yes, it's wonderful, Mrs.…?"

"Taylor," said the woman. "Stephanie Taylor. And you are?"

Rowena gave her name somewhat diffidently; an odd first name is one of those things, like acne or poor parents, that the smallest person in the class can't really afford to have, and five years of low-grade persecution had made Rowena shy about revealing hers to strangers. Mrs. Taylor, however, seemed delightedly intrigued. "Rowena?" she said. "As in the Hogwarts founder?"

"Um... I guess so," said Rowena. "Why, was the founder of Hogwarts named Rowena?"

"Well, one of them was," said Mrs. Taylor. "Hogwarts had four founders, apparently. One of the rare instances in history of a committee doing something right."

"Oh," said Rowena. "Well, I don't know about that. I didn't even know there was such a thing as magic until I got my brochure in the mail."

Mrs. Taylor laughed. "Well, you have the advantage on me," she said. "I didn't know there was such a thing as magic until my daughter got _her_ brochure in the mail."

Rowena blinked. "Really?"

"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Taylor. "I was just a humble desk clerk in the Massachusetts Secretary of State's office until the people at Cricketshorn sent Lara her little wake-up call." Her eyes drifted to one of the framed photographs on the wall, and Rowena realized that one of the drama-club members in the picture was holding a glass mug that read, LARA TAYLOR: RISING STAR, SPRING 1986.

"It was the best thing that ever happened to her," Mrs. Taylor murmured. "I've never seen anyone change so dramatically as Lara did when she found out that all those strange things that happened around her weren't just some bizarre set of coincidences – that she actually was different from all the other children around her. It's like she took an interest in life for the first time since she was three." She sighed. "It's really a wonderful thing they do."

Rowena nodded. "Yeah, I guess it is," she said.

"So I wanted to give something back to them," said Mrs. Taylor, "but, being what American enchanters delicately call a Non-Sensitive, I wasn't exactly equipped to teach Advanced Transmogrification – and as for liberal arts, I think I made a 500 in the verbal section of my SATs. Then I remembered the store on Polif where Lara bought her application, and I thought, heck, even I can sell a few pieces of paper once a year so my husband and I moved down to Delaware, I persuaded Thomas Jones to sell me his store, and I've been here ever since." She smiled. "Now, can I interest you in one of these fine application forms?"

Rowena smiled back at her. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I think you can."


	17. Clothed in White Raiment

The Cricketshorn registration form was not at all what Rowena had expected. She had always thought of official forms in terms of the things her father had to fill out when the cattle at the Flaming O got tested for tuberculosis: large, ominous sheaves of paper filled with black-and-white rectangles and scary-sounding medical terminology. The Cricketshorn registration form, by contrast, was a single sheet of paper that hardly asked any questions at all; it seemed less an attempt to gather statistical information than a means of making sure that she would be among their students in September. The only puzzling part was a box in the upper right-hand corner that read, "If you wish to replace the standard first-year Latin class with any of these alternate languages, please fill in the oval beside its name." The options were Chinese, German, Greek, Hebrew, Old Norse, Sanskrit, and Slavonic.

"Remember, they're a liberal-arts school, not a communications school," said Mrs. Taylor, when she asked her about it. "They're not interested in training you to be a translator at the United Nations; they want to put you in contact with the wisdom of your ancestors. So they teach you the classical languages first, so you can read the big names like Aristotle and Confucius, and then if you like those you can move on to the modern languages that came from them. It's actually not a bad system."

Rowena supposed not. All the same, she left that section blank, on the theory that Latin would be as useful to a Montana rancher's daughter as anything else on that list.

The rest of the form was as simple as a lever, and Rowena finished it in record time. She did feel a slight pang of conscience when she failed to mention her monthly issues in the section that read, "Please notify us about any allergies or other health problems", but she comforted herself with the thought that turning into a wolf at the time of the full moon wasn't a medical issue under any definition that she knew.

"Finished?" said Mrs. Taylor as she brought the completed form to the counter. "All right, then, the next thing that you'll need is a list of all the materials you'll have to buy – and you'll probably want a class schedule for this year, too. Theyre over there on the far wall."

Mr. Osborn frowned, his native farmer's penury asserting itself. "How much is all this going to cost?" he enquired.

"In this store, not a dime," said Mrs. Taylor. "Cricketshorn was started in the mid-1700s, and the founder, Rawlins, was full of Enlightenment-type ideas about the injustice of only educating the wealthy, so Cricketshorn has never charged for enrollment. On the other hand, they seem to have no scruples about soaking you for books and robes and such, so you'd better..."

Rowena froze in the act of taking down a supplies list. "Robes?" she said. "I have to wear robes?"

Mrs. Taylor frowned. "Of course," she said. "School uniform. You saw the pictures."

"I don't wear dresses," said Rowena.

"These aren't dresses," said Mrs. Taylor. "They're robes. Like what Arab princes wear, only with a pointier headpiece."

"No, but... I mean..." Rowena fumbled for a moment; this was a sensitive topic in the Osborn household. Her own preference, instilled by her father and strengthened by her own rambunctious nature, was for strictly practical clothing: blue jeans, tennis shoes, and the sort of shirts one finds in the L. L. Bean catalogue under the heading. This was a source of great distress to her mother, who had cherished hopes of bringing her up to be a genteel Southern lady; it was the one significant quarrel the two of them had, and Rowena consequently tried to avoid talking about it, which tended to render her somewhat inarticulate when trying to explain how hopelessly clumsy she felt when wearing long skirts. (It didn't occur to her simply to tell the story of how she had been cast as an angel at a church Christmas pageant when she was seven, and none of the choir robes had really been short enough for her, which had meant that, on opening night, the congregation of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church had been treated to the spectacle of a tiny, red-haired angel tripping on her robe and falling headlong into the somewhat oversized manger.)

Mrs. Taylor watched her sputter for a moment or two, then quietly said, "Rowena, I can't do anything about Cricketshorn's dress code. If you absolutely can't bring yourself to wear robes, you'll have to either ask the Headmistress to give you a special exemption or take back this form you just filled out."

For a brief moment, Rowena considered the second course of action; then she looked back at the smiling face of Lara Taylor on the wall, and sighed. "Okay, fine," she said.

"That's better," said Mrs. Taylor.

Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. "If it's any consolation, you're not the only one who's complained," she said. "Most of the boys who come in here don't want to be Arab princes, either – but, somehow, the Uraviches always manage to convince them."

Rowena cocked her head. "Who are the Uraviches?"

Mrs. Taylor opened her mouth, then hesitated a moment and shook her head. "No," she said. "I'm not even going to try to describe Daniel and Kyla Uravich. There are some people you just have to see for yourself."

"Okay," said Rowena. "Where do they work?"

* * *

This did not turn out to be an easy question to answer. The Polif Bazaar, as has been noted, is not laid out in any particularly logical pattern, the shop buildings having mostly been conjured up out of thin air in whatever place the founder happened to be standing at the time – and, to make matters even more complicated, many of the Polif merchants think it merely good business sense to move their stores about during the summer rush, so as to always be in the same place as the largest number of customers.

Fortunately, after Rowena had wandered about helplessly for five or six minutes, she caught sight of a poppy-festooned store that proclaimed itself THE EUREKA MOMENT: UP-TO-THE-MINUTE MAPS FOR THE CONFUSED POLIF SHOPPER. The proprietor – evidently the Mr. Hruby of whom Mr. Herbaly had spoken – explained that there was a certain branch of advanced magic that could produce a living replica of a place on paper, so that, as the place itself changed, the map would change as well. He added that, if you wanted to be really fancy, it wasn't hard to arrange the spell so that even the people in the place would appear on the map, and to make the response-delay time so small that you could watch them moving about on the paper – but this, he said, was something he didn't bother to do with his own products. Polif was too crowded during the summer rush; the little black dots representing the customers would crowd out the rest of the map, and all you'd see would be this squirming mass of green ink.

Even his less-sophisticated product, however, proved a godsend to Rowena. Within three minutes, she had located the Polif Boudoir (est. 1763; Daniel and Kyla Uravich, props.) – and, needless to say, no sooner had she ascended the doorstep and raised her hand to knock than she felt a resurgence of the panic that had gripped her in the Polif Cricketshorn Office. She had a sudden vision of Mrs. Uravich, whom she pictured as a tall, dark-haired Frenchwoman (for, although she had gotten good marks in her school geography class, she had no real idea what sort of names people had in any given part of the world), staring down her nose at the little, red-headed ragamuffin standing on her doorstep, and saying, "Well, I can zee zat I shall 'ave a – 'ow you zay – a _fixair-uppair_ to perform zis time."

She looked nervously around the doorstep to see if there was any way of identifying the state that the Uraviches lived in; if it was something exotic, such as Hawaii or New York, she had every intention of running back to the Office and having Mrs. Taylor throw her form into the ocean. For a moment, she couldn't find anything; then her eyes lighted on a tattered piece of paper tacked to the door. It was a picture of what Rowena thought was a bar chart (though it was actually a histogram), with the bars getting progressively lower from left to right, in a pattern that formed a familiar state outline. Along the sides were shown the pictures of every Republican candidate for president since Richard Nixon in 1968, and, at the bottom, the motto, "IDAHO: PROUDLY SKEWED RIGHT."

It was not the sort of expression of state pride that would have brought joy to Nathaniel Osborn's heart, but it came to his daughter as rain in the Sonoran. _Idaho,_ she thought, taking a deep breath. _Okay. I can handle Idaho._

She tapped gently on the door three times. A panel near the top of the door slid open, and a pair of piercing green eyes stared down at her. "Yes?" said a voice, evidently that of the man attached to them.

"Hi," said Rowena. "You're Mr. Uravich, right? Mrs. Taylor said I should come to see you about my school uniform, so..."

"We're closed," said the green-eyed man curtly, and slammed the panel shut again.

Rowena blinked. Both Mrs. Taylor and Mr. Hruby had said that this was the busiest time of year on Polif: that the five or six days in July when aspiring Cricketshorn students came to buy their supplies were, in fact, the only real reason for the Bazaar's existence. Why, then, would the Uraviches have their store closed in the middle of one of those days?

Oh, well, maybe their sewing machine had broken down or something. Rowena turned to leave, not entirely without relief, when she heard an old woman's voice from inside the boudoir say, "Who was that, dear?"

"Jehovah's Witnesses," said Mr. Uravich, and Rowena drew up in mild surprise.

"It was a girl, wasn't it?" said the woman's voice accusingly.

"What difference does it make what sex a Jehovah's Witness is?"

"Daniel Sagacious Uravich, you cheating byproduct of frog spawn, get away from that door," said the woman.

"Now, Kylie, let's be reasonable about this..."

"Reasonable, the man says. Here he is deliberately sabotaging his own covenant partner's honest efforts to humiliate him, and he says let's be reasonable. Well, let me tell you something, Daniel, I've heard enough nonsense out of you in the last forty-six years to make Edward Lear run screaming into the night, so it's a little late to be talking about 'reasonable'."

"Well," said Mr. Uravich's voice, "if we make it a matter of brute force, darling, I'm going to win. After all, your wand's at Krehbiel's waiting to be mended, whereas mine is in my pocket."

"Very true, O lover of my soul," said the other voice, "but you forget that your wife is a platinum-level practitioner of Sansun-Ba-Ton wandless magic, and can cast spells of the utmost potency using so harmless an object as this lacquered hairpin. _Accio My Sneaky, Duplicitous Husband!_"

There was a moment's pause, then a loud crash from the other side of the building that made Rowena jump involuntarily. She was wondering whether she should go looking for a police station and report a domestic disturbance when another panel, this one much closer to the ground, opened up in the door; a pair of wide, blue eyes peered out at her, and Mrs. Uravich's voice said sweetly, "Why, hello there, dear! Do come in, won't you?"

* * *

The door creaked open, and Rowena stepped cautiously inside.

"So you're going to Cricketshorn, are you?" said the old lady. "Dear me, they're making enchantresses tiny this season. I'm going to have to seriously recalculate my fabric requirements, I can see that right now."

A more striking contrast to the tall, supercilious Frenchwoman of Rowena's apprehensions could scarcely have been imagined. Kyla Uravich was a petite, hunchbacked old woman (the only adult Rowena had ever met with whom she could make eye contact without looking up) with a forest of wrinkles on her face, a long, crooked nose, and eyes that looked as though someone had stuck two Ping-Pong balls into her face and drawn pupils on them. After the quotidian, all-American countenances of Trevor Herbaly, Stephanie Taylor, and Carl Hruby, it came almost as a shock to Rowena to find someone at the Bazaar who genuinely looked like a witch.

Her husband, who appeared to have been somehow flung against the far wall and was now attempting to extricate himself from a pile of toppled mannequins, was equally striking in his conformity to magical stereotypes. With his peaked hat, his close-trimmed beard, and his black robe emblazoned with stars and crescents, he strongly suggested the Wizard of Id from Johnny Hart's comic strip of the same name. This was deliberate, since, as far as the Polif Bazaar was concerned, Daniel Uravich was indeed the Wizard of ID, but Rowena was too nervous to make this connection.

"Listen," she said, "if I came at a bad time, I can..."

"Oh, no, no, no, don't worry about it," said Mrs. Uravich. "It's just that Daniel and I have this little competition every year to see who can service more customers – Daniel makes the robes for the boys who come, you know, and I take care of the girls – and, for some reason, there have been a lot more girls than boys this year, so he's feeling a bit put out. Though why he should be turning customers away just to salvage his wounded ego," she added, shooting a glare in her husband's direction, "is more than I can imagine. After all, we pool all our profits, so he's taking money out of his own pocket just as much as mine..."

"Some things are more important than profit, O fairest of wives," said Mr. Uravich, with as much dignity as a 70-year-old man surrounded by prone plaster women can muster. "A man has his pride."

"I see," said Mrs. Uravich. "And that pride is important enough for you to make this poor girl go to Cricketshorn naked?"

"She could have come back tomorrow," said Mr. Uravich. "Then she wouldn't have skewed the overall average so badly, and she would have had to stay at Defibaugh's Hotel for the night, thereby raising the overall revenue of the Bazaar. You see, I'm always thinking of the good of our little community here."

Mrs. Uravich rolled her eyes (which, given their size, was quite a sight). "You just go slip into the girls' dressing room, dearie," she said to Rowena. "I'll be there in just a minute."

As Rowena headed to the back of the store, she heard the two proprietors working out their differences at a volume level rather more appropriate for a crowded construction site than a small dressmaker's shop. She cocked her head to listen, but the Uraviches appeared to have switched from English into some obscure Slavic language, and the barrage of sound essaying from the front office conveyed nothing to her – which, it must be admitted, was probably just as well.

* * *

After about fifteen minutes, Mrs. Uravich came hobbling into the dressing room where Rowena was waiting, with a bolt of white samite slung over her malformed shoulder. "Sorry to keep you so long, darling," she said. "Now, then, let's see about getting you wrapped up, shall we?"

What followed was an experience utterly unlike any that had preceded it in the course of Rowena's short life. Thanks to her mother, she was accustomed to having loving attention lavished on her, but this had always been the quiet, sober affection of a Montana rancher's wife for the child who will someday be mistress over 15,000 acres. The barrage of pettings, primpings, and pamperings that Mrs. Uravich was lavishing on her was something entirely new to her – and although, in her conscious mind, she thought it rather silly, there was a basic, feminine part of her that was utterly beguiled, just as, at that moment, a basic, masculine part of Nathan Pierce was responding vehemently to Mr. Uravich's insinuation that only a pansy would be intimidated by a simple linen cassock.

"There we are, then," said Mrs. Uravich, after about ten minutes of measuring, cutting, and fitting. "Don't you look all nice and scholarly now?"

Rowena glanced around for some way to verify this, only to find, to her surprise, that there wasnt a mirror in sight. This struck her as a trifle strange – after all, it was a dressing room – but, before she could say anything about it, Mrs. Uravich said, "Oh, dear, yes, I'd forgotten. Speculus! You're wanted in the girls' room!"

"Yes, yes, I come," said a surly, heavily accented voice that seemed from nowhere in particular.

Rowena turned and stared wide-eyed at Mrs. Uravich. "You have a talking mirror?" she said.

Mrs. Uravich shrugged. "It's a family heirloom," she said. "From my great-grandmother Artemieva, back in Moldova. You can't get anything like it in the States; the kind of catoptramancy they do at Durmstrang's probably illegal on this side of... ah, here he comes."

There was a momentary blaze of white light; then a body-length, gold-framed mirror appeared on the dressing-room wall, and Rowena gasped involuntarily.

For a moment, she thought that Speculus must have been reflecting someone else. Maybe he was in chronoscopic mode, and she was seeing what her mother R.L. had looked like on one of her really good days. It seemed inconceivable that a mere white robe could turn the plain, rather ragamuffin creature she was used to seeing in the mirror into the pert baby angel in front of her.

"Well, what do you stare at?" said Speculus in an annoyed tone. (She had no idea where his voice was coming from; there was nothing carved into the frame that remotely resembled a mouth.) "You come perhaps from the Dutch Country, and have never seen a mirror before?"

"Oh, don't be silly, Spessik," said Mrs. Uravich. "If the child were Amish, she'd have the head covering. Which reminds me, dear, you'll need to get a wide-brimmed capuchon from Dean's Haberdashery to complete that outfit. Let's see, that's about three blocks down and two over, next to the..."

"I have a map," Rowena whispered.

"Oh, yes, of course you do. Well, then, I'll meet you at the checkout, all right?"

Rowena nodded vaguely, and Mrs. Uravich hobbled out of the dressing room, leaving the young enchantress alone with her magic mirror. Rowena glanced at her reflection again a little self-consciously, and flicked a loose strand of hair back over her shoulder.

"_Ach!_" said Speculus. "There she is again, staring into my glass like a poor lost fawn. Come, little _par-rosu_, what is the trouble?"

Rowena shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "Just nervous, I guess. I've never been to a school like this before, where you've got to wear robes and learn Latin and all the rest of it..."

"And you think, perhaps, it might be too serious for you?" said Speculus.

Rowena considered. "Well, yeah, I guess so."

Speculus snorted. "Ridiculous," he said. "Professor Joy – she who will soon teach you the scrying – she has taken me up to the University some years ago for a demonstration of the catoptramancy. I am of a quiet small town in Bessarabia; never have I seen such a ruckus. These robe-wearing and Latin-learning children, they are shooting off fireworks from their wands and causing statues to declaim Greek poetry. Admitting that this was the bicentennial day of the founding of the school, and was maybe not typical, nevertheless I do not think that you will have a problem of too much seriousness at the University Cricketshorn."

Rowena smiled. "Well, thanks for that vote of confidence, Mr. Speculus."

"Yes, yes," said Speculus. "Now go and pay for the robes."


	18. The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

Rowena had never been the sort of person to linger over sensual pleasures, but now, as she ran back to the Polif Cricketshorn Office, she found herself paying careful attention to every step she took. This was partially because the feeling of soft satin rubbing against her legs (she was wearing shorts beneath her robes) was a novel and pleasing one, but there was a more complex reason as well – one that she herself, if she had tried, could probably not have put into words. It seemed almost as though she ought to behave differently in her school uniform than she did in her everyday clothes; that her ordinary way of walking, which was concerned solely with how quickly you could get from Point A to Point B given the rather significant handicap of 15-inch legs, was somehow inadequate; that, if her body was important enough to merit such precious adornment, it behooved her to pay attention to how she used it. (This, of course, was exactly the reaction that the Cricketshorn dress code was intended to provoke, and the fact that it was still maintained, in the face of a _Zeitgeist_ that disapproved of both dress codes and robes, suggested that Rowena was not the only prospective student on whom it had succeeded.)

The other reason, of course, was that it impressed parents, and the Osborns were no exception to this rule. When Rowena burst into the Office swathed in Dean and Uravich's finest, Mrs. Osborn had to sit back in her chair for a moment and let her heart catch up with her. "Oh, my goodness," she said. "Meg, is that you?"

Rowena giggled. "Yeah, it's me."

"Come here and let me look at you," said Mrs. Osborn, reaching out to brush a strand of her daughter's hair out of her eyes. "Oh, Rowena, I never realized what a beautiful girl you are."

"Yes, she's a cute kid," said Mr. Osborn laconically. (He was, in fact, as impressed by Rowena's sudden metamorphosis as his wife was, but he had a firm belief that, if you praise a young woman's appearance with anything resembling fervor, she will take this as an excuse to develop an interest in makeup – and Nathaniel Osborn shared the opinion of his 19th-century forebears that "painted women" were an abomination.) "Was there any money left over, Meg?"

"Oh, yeah," said Rowena, and reached into the little pouch around her waist to pull out her father's $10.36 in change. "Here you go."

"Thanks, hon," said Mr. Osborn, slipping the bill and the pile of coins into his wallet. "Now, then, what's the next thing youll need to get?"

Rowena shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "Books, I guess."

"What books?"

Rowena blinked. "Ones for school," she said. "Isn't that what we're buying all this stuff for?"

"Yes, of course," said Mr. Osborn patiently, "but do you have a list of titles that you'll need, or were you just going to guess?"

This aspect of the thing hadn't occurred to Rowena. She shot a helpless look at Mrs. Taylor, who smiled and drew a pink sheet of paper from beneath her desk. "Here you go, Rowena," she said. "One Cricketshorn required-reading list, on the house."

"Thanks," said Rowena gratefully.

"All right, then," said Mr. Osborn. "Now, the next question would be, can your mother and I go with you on this trip, or is textbook-shopping something else that you can't bear to have anybody watch you do?"

Rowena blushed at the memory of her childish request that her parents not be around when she bought her school robes. "No, that's okay, you can be there," she said.

"Glad to hear it," said Mr. Osborn. "Shall we, Julie?"

* * *

Some twenty minutes later, Rowena was standing in the far back of Olympia Books, trying to find a used copy of _Transmogrification for Beginners_, when the door to the upstairs level swung open and a blonde girl in a blue jumper ran into the Polif section of the store.

Rowena took an immediate liking to this girl, although she couldn't say exactly why. Partially, no doubt, it was because she was unusually pretty – for envy, as has been noted, had been left completely out of Rowena's makeup, and it awoke only admiration in her when she met someone else who possessed a virtue that she lacked. (Despite the wonders that Mrs. Uravich had worked on her, Rowena still didn't consider herself a great beauty, an assessment that was probably fairly accurate.) Partially, also, it was because of the eager, almost joyful glance she was casting around the bookstore; the girl's excitement at the adventure on which she was about to embark was almost palpable, and Rowena couldn't help getting caught up in it.

But what really made the difference, perhaps, was that the girl was only an inch or two taller than Rowena was. To someone who has never had the problem, it is probably impossible to explain how tiring it is to always have to crane your neck to meet people's gazes, or how easily one embraces as a friend someone whose eyes are roughly the same distance from the ground as one's own. There is something comforting about such a person, as though you and she are the only two Americans in a country full of Dutchmen; perhaps this was how the Pygmies became a separate nation.

In any case, Rowena was enchanted.

"Hi," she said shyly.

The girl turned around, saw Rowena, and smiled. "First year?" she said.

Rowena nodded.

"Me too," said the girl, "but we've been looking forward to it since last Christmas. My dad, you know, got a classics first at La Cuela, and he's always going on about 'dear old Amamus', so its kind of..."

"Amamus?" Rowena queried.

The girl laughed. "Yeah, Amamus," she said. "He's the Latin professor. His real name's Matthew Castiglione, but they call him Amamus because he never lets anyone stop at _amo, amas, amat_." She shrugged. "It's Cricketshorn, what can I say?"

"I don't know," Rowena admitted. "I don't really know much about any of this. My own dad's a rancher in Montana."

"Honest?" said the girl, sounding intrigued. "As in, he rides around on a horse rounding up cattle?"

"Well, not so much anymore," said Rowena. "After he turned fifty, he kind of slowed down and let Mr. DePinto take over most of that side of it. But yeah, that's the basic idea."

The girl sighed wistfully, perhaps imagining herself riding on horseback with her own father across the Montana hills. "It must be awesome," she said.

Rowena smiled. "Yeah, it's all right," she said. "By the way, I'm Rowena."

"Rowena," the girl repeated thoughtfully, and nodded. "I like it. I'm Noah Dickson."

Rowena blinked. "Noah?" she repeated.

The girl sighed, like someone who's explained this a hundred times before. "Yeah," she said. "See, my mom's what she calls a Christian feminist, and she found this story in the Pentateuch somewhere about how the daughters of Zelophehad persuaded Moses to let them inherit a portion of their father's goods, and so she decided to name her own daughters after them – and, apparently, one of them was named Noah." She shrugged. "I don't know, maybe there was a flood in Egypt the year she was born or something."

"Wow," said Rowena. "And I thought my name was bad."

Noah's eyes twinkled. "Well, it could be worse," she said. "My little sister got stuck as Hoglah."

The two girls' gazes met, and they burst into a fit of giggles that lasted nearly a minute, startling a black girl who was looking through history books two shelves away. If Destiny had had any doubts as to whether these two ought to become bosom friends, they were removed in that minute.

"Oh," Rowena gasped, when she found herself able to breathe again. "Oh, that's awful."

"I know," said Noah, "but that's my mom. The names appear in a certain order in the Bible, so her daughters are going to have the names in that order, no matter what. It's the same when we read the Bible at dinner; we can't ever skip a chapter, even if it's something completely useless like the genealogies in 1 Chronicles. She says it's because all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness–" (she rattled this part off at high speed, and Rowena got the impression that it was something she had had to memorize at some point) "–but really it's because she just doesn't like to skip things."

"Well, I can understand that, of course," said Rowena, "but still... _Hoglah?_"

Noah sighed. "Yeah," she said. "Hoglah."

"Now, Noah," said a mock-stern voice from behind them, "you should know better than to go around talking about your sister behind her back."

Rowena jumped involuntarily, but Noah rolled her eyes and turned to the large, mustachioed figure standing beside the scrying shelf. "Dad, I'm not _gossiping_ about Hoglah," she said, in a playfully exasperated tone. "I'm just telling Rowena about how she and I got our names."

"Ah," said her father. "Well, I suppose we can permit that – but don't let it happen again, you hear?"

"Yes, sir," said Noah, with a pretense of demureness.

"So," said Mr. Dickson, turning his attention to his daughter's new acquaintance. "Rowena, eh? Rowena what?"

"Um... Osborn," said Rowena hesitantly. She wasn't quite sure about Mr. Dickson; her comfort with grown-ups was dictated by how closely they resembled one of her parents, and Noah's father appeared to be a direct contrast to her own in every visible respect. Her father was fifty-four, while Mr. Dickson couldn't have been more than thirty-five; her father, although powerfully built, was compact and angular, while Mr. Dickson was large and rounded; her father's sense of humor was dry and sardonic, while Mr. Dickson seemed to favor a more bombastic, exaggerated approach. And, of course, if the Dicksons had nightly Bible readings and named their daughters after obscure Old Testament characters, there was every likelihood that they were Republicans.

Mr. Dickson's first words confirmed this suspicion. "What!" he said, widening his eyes as though astonished. "Noah, you don't mean to tell me that you're making friends with that old Communist's granddaughter, do you?" He jerked his thumb at Mr. Osborn, who was sitting by the door, watching him with narrowed eyes. "Really, I thought I'd raised you better than that."

Rowena's gorge started to rise on her father's behalf, but apparently the Dicksons were still playing with one another, because Noah widened her eyes in an affectation of innocence. "But Dad, I'm going to Cricketshorn," she said. "I have to be able to get along with fringe radicals and cultists. After all, even Amamus is a Catholic."

"Well, that's true enough," Mr. Dickson conceded, "but at least he's not planning on reinvigorating the Soviet Union by voting Bill Clinton into power. At least, I don't think he is," he added with a sudden frown, as though the notion that Professor Castiglione's Romish subversion extended so far as supporting the Arkansas governor was a novel and disturbing one.

Noah shrugged. "Well, even if Mr. Osborn is a dangerous lunatic, you can't hold that against Rowena," she said. "Just because she has his genes in her doesn't mean she's going to have the same glaring flaws."

Mr. Dickson nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, you're right, Noah," he said. "We should only condemn Miss Osborn when we've discovered her own, individual glaring flaws. My apologies, Rowena," he said, with a mock bow.

"That's okay," said Rowena. "And by the way, I don't actually have my dad's genes in me. I was left in an airport when I was a baby, and Mom and Dad brought me home."

It wasn't something she generally told people until she knew them fairly well – her mother had trained her to be reticent on the subject, on the theory that she might someday meet a biological relative who might try to claim custody of her – but, in this case, she was getting desperate to change the subject, and her lineage was the only conversational segue she could think of. It turned out, moreover, to be everything she could have desired, as the suggestion that they had actually met a foundling child drove the presidential election straight out of the Dicksons' heads.

"You're _kidding,_" Noah breathed.

Rowena smiled sheepishly. "'Fraid not."

"You mean that actually happens in real life?" said Mr. Dickson, shaking his head. "Well, what do you know. And here I thought Dickens was putting us on all that time."

"Do you know why your parents did that?" Noah wanted to know. "Your birth parents, I mean. Left you in the airport, I mean. Not that you have to talk about it, I mean, if you don't want to, but..."

"We think they might have had mental problems," said Rowena vaguely. It was a purposeful vagueness: she didn't know how enchanters felt about werewolves, and she didn't want to scare Noah off before she'd really gotten to know her.

"Well, of course they had mental problems," said Mr. Dickson. "Why else would they abandon a charming girl like you?"

Rowena grinned in spite of herself. Maybe she did like Mr. Dickson, after all.

"Do people ever tell you that you look like your parents?" said Noah. "There's this girl at our school who's adopted, and she and her dad just happen to have _exactly_ the same color eyes, and she always..."

But what Noah's schoolmate always would forever remain a mystery, for at that moment another set of footsteps was heard on the basement steps, and a dainty blond woman (Rowena perceived a distinct resemblance to Noah, and concluded, correctly, that this was her mother) passed through the doorway. "Well, Noah?" she said. "Have you gotten all your books yet?"

Noah flushed. "Um... actually, I haven't started looking yet," she said.

"You haven't started looking yet?" Mrs. Dickson repeated. "For heaven's sake, Noah, what have you been doing down here all this time?"

"I... um... I was, uh..."

"It was my fault, ma'am," Rowena interposed. "I started talking to her when she came down, and I guess we just got distracted."

Noah shook her head. "No, Rowena, it's not your fault," she said.

"Sure it is," Rowena insisted. "You came downstairs, you were looking around, and I said hi to you."

"What difference does that make?" Noah demanded. "That didn't mean I had to start chattering your ear off about Amamus and Hoglah and all that."

"You weren't chattering my ear off," said Rowena. "I wanted to listen. That makes it my fault."

"No, it does _not_," said Noah, "and besides..."

A sudden, shrill whistle interrupted the two girls in mid-argument. Noah clapped her mouth shut, and her mother removed her fingers from between her lips and spoke in the measured tones of a practiced conciliator. "Thank you, girls," she said. "I think I get the gist. The two of you were seduced by each other's irrepressible charm and started getting to know each other instead of buying books. All very natural, and I daresay I would have done the same thing at your age, but I'm surprised that you, Noah, should have been so frivolous. Or have you forgotten that someone's waiting for us back in Washington?"

Rowena had no idea what that was about, but it seemed to be a distressing subject for Noah, from whose face the light went out as abruptly as if someone had thrown a switch. "Yeah, okay," she said. "Sorry, Mom."

"That's all right, honey," said Mrs. Dickson. "Now let's get a move on. We have a lot to do here, and only a few hours in which to do it."

Noah nodded. "Sorry, Rowena," she said. "Looks like I've got to go."

"That's okay," said Rowena.

Noah gave a little half-smile and turned toward the front desk of the bookshop.

"See you at school," Rowena called after her.

Noah turned back around and smiled; it seemed to Rowena that her face had brightened back up a little at that, though it might just have been that she was better placed now with respect to the ceiling lamp. "You, too," she said.

Rowena nodded, returning Noah's smile with one of her own, and turned back to the transmogrification shelf, feeling better about the upcoming school year than she had for nearly thirty-six hours.


End file.
